The Turing Test

by Chris Beckett

  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.

  “Another hour passed. I endured the king’s poets repeating their repertoire for the third time. (‘Wahita wahiteh zloosh / wamineh weyopla droosh!…’ repeated after every one of twenty-three verses!)

  “And then a door opened at the end of the dais, all the warriors lumbered to their feet, and the king’s three daughters were led in.”

  At this point in his narration, Clancy asked for wine.

  Sphere poured it for him.

  “The harpooneer had not lied to me, all three princesses were indeed beautiful and it wasn’t hard now to see why they had taken so long. Their hair was plaited, ribboned and piled in elaborate structures on their heads, their bodies, bare to the waist, had been freshly painted in the most intricate designs of entwined sea plants and sea creatures.

  “They came round the table and knelt behind my seat, the youngest first, her sisters behind. Then, at a word from the king, the youngest daughter stood up, offered her hand to me briefly and went to stand behind him. The second daughter did the same. And then the third, the oldest…”

  Clancy gulped down his wine and went across to the dispenser for more. He was agitated, scared.

  “What the hell is that feeling?” he demanded. “It’s not like lust at all, but you can’t call it love, not when you don’t know the person. It’s like a buried longing for some kind of sweetness, which we try to stifle beneath worldliness and weariness and all the busy pointless tasks we lay upon ourselves. And suddenly a person touches it for some reason and it erupts, all focused on that one person, her lovely sad intelligent eyes, her unconscious grace…”

  He checked himself.

  “What a load of crap! What do I know about her except her face? What is it I want from that face? What can a face give me? What is a face except muscle and skin? Damn it, it means nothing, nothing! It’s all just a trick played on us by biology!”

  “Are we still doing dictation?” Com politely enquired.

  “No of course we aren’t, you plastic prat!”

  Clancy swallowed the wine in one gulp and shoved the empty cup straight back into the dispenser for more.

  “Okay, let’s admit it. The oldest daughter, Wayeesha. When I met her eyes it felt as if something passed between us, some recognition, some hope that it might not always be necessary to be so… so terribly alone. It’s all crap, of course: she’s not much more than half my age, she’s been brought up to marry some iron age warlord on some bleak little island. We don’t even speak the same language.”

  He downed the third cup of wine in one, with a little shudder.

  “All that we might possibly have in common is some kind of longing to escape…”

  “Sometimes it helps to talk about what happened,” said Com, after a ten-microsecond conference with Sphere. “Perhaps if you finished the story…”

  “Oh for God’s sake spare me your second-hand wisdom you sanctimonious rattle!” exclaimed Clancy.

  But in spite of that he sat down again and carried on.

  *

  “So then when all three women were standing behind the king’s chair, he smiled proudly at me and asked me whether or not they were indeed as beautiful as people had told me. Of course I said yes.

  “‘That’s good,’ he said, ‘and now the choice is entirely yours.’

  “I suppose I had been rather naïve, but until that point I hadn’t understood that when I asked to see his daughters he had assumed that I wanted one of them for a wife.”

  Again Clancy jumped to his feet.

  “Damn it Com, this is intolerable. One minute I was falling for a woman in a way that seemed scary and new to me, the very next minute I was being offered her hand in marriage. How could anyone deal with that? I played for time, of course. I said that in my own world a man sleeps on a decision like that… Delete that whole paragraph. You rewrite it. Leave out the nonsense about my personal feelings. Just describe her as very attractive and tempting. Generic rather than personal. Worldly rather than sentimental. Low adjective count.”

  “Done. Shall I read it back to you?”

  “Later… It’s maddening. This is precisely the event I needed to bring the book together. The marriage of sky and sea! The space traveller falls in love with the daughter of a fisher king. What could be better! Damn! Damn! Why has reality always got to be so awkward.”

  “Go on.” said Com, who was a good listener.

  “I mean it might make a good book, but if I marry her I can’t just go back to the city with the book, can I? I have to go back with her. How would it look if I bring back some kid half my age who doesn’t even know how to read or write? I’ll look like a dirty old man.”

  “Don’t forget,” said Com, who had filed and indexed everything they’d learnt about the local culture, “that here it is the man who moves to live with the woman. Woman are not allowed to cross the sea.”

  “So I couldn’t take her back with me? Yes, that’s true. And if a marriage fails here a man returns to his own island doesn’t he?”

  Clancy sat down, picked up the yellow egg and turned it over in his hands.

  “You may look like a kid’s rattle, Com, but you have your uses. I could marry her here, and if things didn’t work out, which of course they won’t after a while, I can take off home. No harm done, a lovely honeymoon, and a nice sad end for the story. Sky and sea try to marry, but in the end they just don’t mix. Spaceman has to be free, even at the price of loneliness and alienation. Ocean princess has to be with her people...”

  Then he frowned. He was very cold and empty inside, but not wholly without scruples. He was concerned, at any rate, with how his actions might be seen.

  “But that is just using her, isn’t it? I can’t do that. My readers wouldn’t like it. They don’t expect me to be an angel, but they do expect a certain… integrity. Damn.”

  He thought for a while.

  “And anyway she is so beautiful, and so sad. I don’t want to…”

  A thought occurred to him.

  “By the way, I meant to ask you. When she shook my hand she said something, very quietly, so no one else could hear. What was it?”

  “Eesha zhu moosha – you have my heart. Do you want me to play it back as she said it?”

  “No!”

  Clancy jumped up as if he had been stung. He was shaking with fear.

  “Oh alright,” he whispered, shrinking back down, as if in anticipation of a blow, “go on, play it back.”

  When he had heard it, he wept: just two tears, but tears all the same, such as he hadn’t shed for years.

  “Damn it, Com, I’ll do it. In this culture marriage is all about using people. It won’t do her any harm to have been married to the sky man! I’m going to bloody do it. Do it and be damned f
or once.”

  He glared at the yellow egg as if it had questioned his action.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll make the book come out right somehow.”

  *

  Down in the wattle and daub settlement the fisher king had a lookout post beside his hall. It consisted of two tree-trunks fixed cleverly end to end, with a small crowsnest at the top. He invited Clancy up there on the night before the wedding to watch as the other grooms arrived from across the sea.

  Weddings in the sea-world were communal affairs, taking place on a single day just once a year. Bonfires burned all along the beach. Under a huge half-moon that dwarfed the island and made the sea itself seem small, canoes appeared in the distance among the glittering waves, first of all as faint dark smudges and then gradually growing more distinct as they approached the land and the firelight. Each one was cheered as it approached and, as they drew close to the beach, the king’s warriors waded out into the sea to greet the new arrivals and help to drag the boats ashore.

  Clancy turned to the king and smiled. It was a magnificent spectacle.

  The king laughed.

  “And now,” he said, “the burning of the boats.”

  He raised his arms and gave a signal to his followers on the beach, who at once set to, dragging the canoes one after another onto the fires. The grooms objected ritually and had to be ritually restrained, but there was a lot of laughter. It was clearly all in fun.

  Clancy frowned.

  “Why do you do that?”

  “When a man marries, his wandering days should end, isn’t that so?”

  The king winked.

  “That moon-boat of yours, it won’t burn quite so easily!”

  “What do you mean?”

  Clancy looked over to the headland where Sphere was perched on its tripod legs. A fire was burning beneath it.

  “Hey! What are they doing! Stop them!” he cried out, and then laughed at himself. How could mere fire harm a vessel designed to cope with space?

  The king laughed good-naturedly with him, putting a friendly arm round the shoulders of his son-in-law to be.

  “Those rocks are easily shattered under the moon,” he observed, “and we have fires in the caves below as well.”

  When he heard Com translate this, it took Clancy a few seconds before he grasped the implications – and in that short time the first boulder had broken loose and crashed down into the sea.

  “No!” Clancy shouted. “Make them stop! It’s my only way back!”

  The king roared with laughter.

  “I’m not joking!” cried Clancy, looking around for the rope ladder to get down. “Have the fires put out at once!”

  Over on the headland a second boulder crashed down, then a third. And then the sphere itself tipped over, its surfaces glinting in the pink moonlight as it rolled onto its back, its tripod legs sticking up in the air as if it was a stranded sheep. Some more rocks exploded. In agonising slow-motion, or so it seemed, Sphere went over the edge, crashing against the cliff – once… twice… – hitting the sea with a mighty splash, then slowly sinking beneath the waves.

  With one foot on the rope ladder, Clancy watched, appalled. And the king, still laughing, his face wet with tears, reached down, helped him kindly back onto the platform and gave him a warm, fishy hug.

  “The boats are burnt! So now you can go to Wayeesha.”

  Clancy walked over to the rough wooden rail at the edge of the platform, looked out at the bonfires, the glittering sea, the giant moon, and remembered Wayeesha waiting for him in the hall below.

  As he had trained himself to do in even the most extreme situations, he examined his thoughts. What he found surprised him. He turned to the king with a smile.

  “I’m going to regret this. And I fear that you, my friend, are going to be seriously disappointed. But right now, it’s strange, I feel as if I’ve put down a burden. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so free!”

  *

  “A good ending for the book!” Com observed.

  “What book you idiot?” said Clancy. “Are we going to write it on seaweed, or carve it into the stones?”

  Then he proffered the yellow egg to the king.

  “Here,” he said, “it’s yours. I don’t need it, and I feel you ought to get something from your alliance with the sky. No need to translate that last sentence, Com.”

  “Is this wise?” asked Com, as the king turned it over reverently in his large hands.

  “No,” said Clancy. “In a few months your battery will run out and you really will just be a plastic egg. Then what will the king think of my gift?”

  He went to the rope ladder and began to lower himself, carefully avoiding looking down.