Turing Test

by Chris Beckett

  William’s face was radiant, but I had had enough. I made my own way back to the door and back into daylight. Those decaying woods outside had seemed sour and gloomy before, but compared to the dark stable of the fire horse they now seemed almost cheerful. I went down the steps and, making myself comfortable on a fallen tree, took out my notebook and began to record some thoughts while I waited for the poet to finish whatever it was he felt he needed to do in there. I was surprised and pleased to find my imagination flowing freely. The imprisoned fire horse, it seemed, had provided the catalyst, the injection of venom, that sooner or later I always needed to bring each book of mine to life. Inwardly laughing, I poured out idea after idea while the muffled screams of the tormented monster kept on and on –- and from time to time another flash of lightening momentarily illuminated the cracks in the door at the top of the stairs.

  After a few minutes William emerged. His face was shining.

  “I’ll tell you why I don’t get rid of him, Clancy,” he declared, speaking rather too loudly, as if he was drunk. “Because he is what I love best in the whole world! The only thing I’ve ever loved, apart from my Uncle John.”

  Behind him the fire horse screamed again and I wondered what William thought he meant by ‘love’ when he spoke of this animal which he had condemned to solitude and darkness and madness.

  “I feel I have fallen in your esteem,” he said on the way back to the house.

  There had been a long silence between us as we trudged back from the dank little valley of brambles and stinging nettles and out again into the formal, public parkland of William’s and his mother’s country seat.

  “You are repelled, I think,” William persisted, “by the idea of my doting on a horse which I have never dared to ride. Isn’t that so?”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say, so he answered for me.

  “You are repelled and actually so am I. I am disgusted and ashamed by the spectacle of my weakness. And yet this is the only way I know of making myself feel alive. Do you understand me? You find my work a little constipated and bottled up, you say. But if I didn’t go down to the fire horse, shamed and miserable as it makes me feel, I wouldn’t be able to write at all.”

  I made myself offer a reassuring remark.

  “We all have to find our way of harnessing the power of our demons.”

  It would have been kinder, and more honest, if I had acknowledged that the encounter with the firehorse had been a catalyst for me also, and that for the first time in this visit my book had begun to flow and come alive. But I couldn’t bring myself to make such a close connection between my own experience and his.

  *

  That night William slipped out shortly after his mother returned, without goodbyes or explanations.

  “I suppose he showed you his blessed horse?” said Lady Henry as she and I sat at supper.

  “He did. An extraordinary experience I must say.”

  “And I suppose he told you that the horse and his Uncle John were the only things he had ever really loved?”

  My surprise must have shown. She nodded.

  “It’s his standard line. He’s used it to good effect with several impressionable young girls. Silly boy. Good lord, Mr Clancy, he doesn’t have to stay with me if he doesn’t want to! We are wealthy people after all! We have more than one house! I have other people to push me around!”

  She gave a bitter laugh.

  “I don’t know what kind of monster you think I am Mr Clancy, and I don’t suppose it really matters, but I will tell you this. When William was six and his uncle tried to get him to ride, he clung to me so tightly and so desperately that it bruised me, and he begged and pleaded with me to promise that I’d never make him do it. That night he actually wet his bed with fear. Perhaps you think I was weak and I should have made him ride the horse? But, with respect Mr Clancy, remember that you are not a parent yourself, and certainly not the sole parent of an only child.”

  Her eyes filled with tears and she dabbed at them angrily with her napkin.

  “His father was a violent, arrogant drunk,” she said. “Far worse than my brother. He was the very worst type of Flainian male. He pushed me down the stairs you know. That was how I ended up like this. He pushed me in a fit of rage and broke my back. It was a miracle that William survived, a complete miracle. And then, when I refused to promise to keep secret the reason for my paralysis, my dear brave husband blew off his own head. I wanted William to be different. I wanted him to be gentle. I didn’t want him to glory in strength and danger.”

  She gave a small, self-deprecating shrug.

  “I do acknowledge that I lack a certain… lightness.”

  “Lady Henry, I am sure that…”

  But the poet’s mother cut me off.

  “Now do try this wine, Mr Clancy,” she cried brightly, so instantly transformed that I almost wondered whether I had dreamed what had gone before. “It was absurdly expensive and I’ve been saving it for someone who was capable of appreciating it.”

  *

  In the early hours of the morning I heard William come crashing in through the front doors.

  “Come and get my boots off!” he bellowed. “One of you lazy bastards come down and take off my boots.”

  And then I heard him outside the door of my room abusing some servant or other who was patiently helping him along the corridor.

  “Watch out, you clumsy oaf! Can’t you at least look where you’re going?”

  He still hadn’t emerged when I left in the morning for the Metropolis.

  The Gates of Troy

  “Wow!” breathed my friend Hannibal, as we drew up beside the Croesus. “That’s not a yacht, it’s a bloody ship!”

  I laughed. Shiny and sleek, Dad’s motor yacht dwarfed the boats moored either side, though they themselves were big by most people’s reckoning, and cost more than an average human being earns in a lifetime.

  I led the way up the gangplank. Han followed (and behind Han, the chauffeur carrying our bags.) I smiled a little wearily as Han let out various exclamations of amazement. This kind of reaction – to the Croesus, to the houses, to the cars and planes and helicopters – has become tedious over the years. But of course this was a new world to Han, a world of almost godlike opulence, even though by most people’s reckoning Han’s family is far from poor.

  For myself, when I look at the Croesus, I feel oppressed by the scale and flamboyance of the thing, as if it required of me that I too should be extravagant and larger than life, like Dad.

  “Mehmet!” I called.

  Wiry, white-haired, leathery with sun, the Croesus’ faithful crewman emerged smiling from within. His whole working life has been given over to the care of the Croesus and its four predecessors, and to my father, who he adores.

  “Master Alex! How nice to see you, sir. You have finished at school now, I understand?”

  “Nice to see you too Mehmet.” (The chauffeur put down the bags and disappeared). “This is my school friend Hannibal. Yes, school’s out for good. It feels great!”

  Actually it felt very frightening, but one didn’t say that.

  “Well, we are ready to leave as soon as you want.”

  “Great. We’ll just settle in, and then let’s be off.”

  *

  “That was extraordinary!” enthused Han as I showed him his cabin.

  “What was?”

  “You just had a conversation in, what, Turkish?”

  “Albanian actually.” I sighed, “I’m sure I told you about my language splice didn’t I?”

  “I guess I didn’t quite…”

  The fact was that I hadn’t had a conversation in Albanian at all. I had had a conversation in English. The language splice intercepted what Mehmet said in Albanian while it was still a signal in my auditory nerves and translated it for me. I replied in English, but the splice again intercepted the nerve signals going to my vocal cords and substituted the Albanian which actually came out of my mouth. The thing
did this fluently with several hundred languages, and – because it knew examples of every language family from Indo-European to Uto-Aztecan – it would have a competent stab at any language at all, learning a new one properly in a day or two.

  So when I listened, I only ever heard English. I could hear other languages as background noise, but as soon as I paid attention, they turned into English. It was my father’s answer to my expressing an interest in studying languages at University.

  “Waste of time, Alex, complete waste of time. No-one needs to study languages now.”

  My objections were dismissed as mere funk and the splice was put in under a local anaesthetic.

  It was the same with history when I expressed an interest in that. Ask me a question about history, any question at all! The President of Latvia in 1988? Gorbunov. The death of Constantine the Great? 337 c.e. You see I don’t even have to think about it.

  A pity really.

  *

  An hour later I was steering the Croesus out to sea through a white forest of sailing yachts, tactfully assisted by Mehmet. Han had a go too when we were out in open water. Then we let Mehmet take over.

  He headed for Corsica. We wandered up to the fore deck, stripped down to swimming trunks, opened some beers, rolled up the first of many joints and congratulated ourselves on being free.

  Giving me the use of the Croesus for the summer was Dad’s leaving-school present.

  “Go where you like, take who you like. Have an adventure on me!” he’d said.

  I know exactly what he had in mind: me and two or three red-blooded scions of the billionaire classes taking the Mediterranean watering holes by storm, seducing beautiful young women, shinning up drain-pipes, getting into scrapes. His disappointment was obvious when I chose as my sole companion a mere doctor’s son, tongue-tied with awe in his presence, who’d only started at my school a couple of terms previously.

  “At least reassure me you two are not a pair of fags,” he grumbled.

  “No, we’re not!” I exclaimed, reddening.

  But in fact there was a little of that in the air.

  *

  We had a division of labour. Mehmet navigated, refuelled, negotiated with harbourmasters, cooked, maintained the toilets, did the shopping and sluiced down the deck. Han and I took the odd turn at the wheel.

  We went from Corsica to Sardinia, on to Sicily and Crete, and then north to meander between the Aegean islands. Sometimes we anchored off beaches and had a swim, or went ashore and explored the prettier towns. We avoided the big marinas and the gathering places of the rich. We made no serious attempt to meet people. And we talked a lot, Han and I, often about the lives that lay ahead of us and all the constraints and difficulties that put our dreams outside our reach.

  “I’m going to medical school because that’s always been the case,” Han said. “My dad scraped and struggled his way into medical school from the gutters of Beirut. He’d prepared a niche for his son before his son was even born, and it hasn’t occurred to him for one second to wonder whether his son might have plans of his own. Actually I hate sick people and the sight of blood makes me throw up.”

  “Tell me about it! With me it’s like every time I express an interest in anything Dad gets it for me instantly. So it ceases to be an aspiration, ceases to be something to aim for. People think I’m being indulged, but actually I’m being fobbed off…”

  And so on. We laughed a lot and touched each other a lot in what was ostensibly a brotherly horsing-around sort of way. But sometimes the eye contact lingered and was hard to break. I found myself noticing how good-looking Hannibal was with those dark Levantine eyes and how close we were, and he was clearly thinking similar sorts of things. He even tried to speak about it.

  “You know Alex, you really are the only real friend I’ve ever had in my life. I feel I can talk to you about…”

  But there was a boundary still and I drew back when he seemed to draw too close to it.

  “It’s this puff mate. It’s good stuff. It makes everything seem like a revelation.”

  We were a bit in love with each other, but homosexuality was not a territory where I would feel at home.

  Mehmet kept carefully out of our way.

  *

  We were off the Aegean coast of Turkey, moving towards the Dardanelles, when the helicopter appeared in the distance.

  “Looks like one of Dad’s,” I observed idly and began rolling another joint.

  When Han passed the joint back to me to finish it off, I looked round again at the helicopter which was much nearer now: nearly overhead.

  “Jesus, it is Dad’s!” I exclaimed, leaping convulsively to my feet and tossing the remains of the joint guiltily into the sea.

  Han laughed disbelievingly. But then the helicopter was hovering overhead, a door was opening and a figure was being winched down towards us.

  “It’s your father, Master Alex!” exclaimed Mehmet, rushing excitedly up on deck after speaking to the helicopter on the radio.

  I was less enchanted.

  “What the fuck does he think he’s doing!”

  But then Dad was on the fore deck, unbuckling his harness: big, bronzed, beaming, radiant with energy and health.

  “I thought I’d pay you boys a visit!”

  Mehmet, who worships Dad, rushed forward and so did well brought-up Han, but my father held up a restraining hand.

  “Just a minute. I’ve got a little surprise for you!”

  The winch cable had gone up and now came down again with a large oblong package in a sling.

  We helped to remove it. At a wave from Dad, the winch went up again and the helicopter left.

  “Right then,” my father said, “now I need a drink.”

  Mehmet hurried to oblige and we went down to the back of the yacht to sit in the shade of the canopy.

  “So what have you been up to?” Dad asked.

  Han, all stumbling and deferential and addressing him as ‘sir’, began to describe our route so far in boring detail. I interrupted to tell Dad about the highlights: the school of dolphins off the coast of Malta, the sunset over a tiny Sardinian cove, the octopus speared by a fisherman in Crete, its tentacles pulling and tugging at his trident just like a child being tickled, trying to pull the big fingers away… I knew Dad wouldn’t be interested. I knew his eyes would glaze over in a matter of seconds. But he’d asked the question and I was damned if I was going to let him get away without waiting for me to answer.

  “Nothing much then,” was how he summed up when I’d finished. “That’s what I thought. Well, I knew you could do with a bit of excitement so I brought you this.”

  He indicated the mysterious oblong, still wrapped in the canvas bag it had worn in the sling, then called out to Mehmet.

  “Mehmet, old friend, you come and look at this too. It’s the future of yachting!”

  Incidentally, he spoke to Mehmet in English and Mehmet spoke English in reply. Dad always spoke English. (If absolutely necessary he carried a pocket translator). I once asked him why he hadn’t had a language splice put in like me, if he thought they were such a good idea.

  “Over the hill, I’m afraid, Al. The docs tell me it’s a bad move at my age. If splice technology had been around when I was younger I would have gone for it like a shot.”

  But I doubt that very much. I can’t imagine my father accepting anything inside his head that was made by another human being. He is, as they say, a self made man.

  *

  Anyway. The package.

  Even when it was out of its bag, we were none the wiser. It was a white rectangular object with a set of controls and a display panel located roughly in the middle. There was also a suitcase-shaped box stuffed in with it into the canvas bag.

  Dad was delighted by our expressions of incomprehension.

  “No idea?” he asked. “Well, you’ll certainly never guess. It’s a temporal navigator, no less. A time machine!”

  We all gasped. There are, after all, onl
y a few such things in the world.

  “That’s worth more than the GNP of a medium sized country,” exclaimed Han in a breathless semi-whisper, when my father had gone for piss. “And your Dad calmly lowers it from a helicopter onto a boat!”

  I was irritated by his star-struck awe. He knew my feelings about my father. He’d listened, he’d sympathised. But when it came to it, he was just as gibbering and servile as everyone else in my father’s actual presence, bowled over by his wealth and fame, and by the child-like egocentrism that came with it.

  “Now I defy you to have a boring time with this, Alex,” Dad said, settling back into his chair. “The Roman Empire. The Ancient Egyptians. Moses. You can go back five thousand years if you want to!”

  “That’s wonderful, sir,” Han gushed, “I just can’t get it through my head that this is a real temporal navigator. I mean you hear about these things but you don’t expect to actually go back in time yourself. Wow! Unbelievable!”

  He cast around for intelligent questions.

  “I’ve… I’ve never quite gathered why people always use these at sea?”

  “Because when you travel back you take a few hundred tonnes of the surrounding matter with you,” Dad said, “Not too awkward if it’s just water, but rather difficult on land. And on land you’d run rather a risk of materialising slap in the middle of a building or something.”

  “But isn’t the planet in a different position anyway? I mean what with rotation and going round the sun and the sun itself, you know, going round the galaxy…”

  Dad shrugged vaguely and looked away, as he did when irritated by pettifogging details.

  “They say it is the ultimate yachting accessory,” murmured Mehmet, who had taken delivery of many expensive yachting gizmos over the years, and acquired prestige as a result among the little fraternity of motor yacht chauffeurs.

  But my father, always impatient with chat, was unpacking the box that came with the time machine.

  “A few bits and pieces here in case there’s any trouble. These little torch things give out blinding coloured light and make a deafening sound. Here’s a couple of laser guns. These cylinder things here, they’re small force shields. You strap them on your belt. If things get hairy you press this button and it sets up a protective field around you. There are modern weapons that could get through it but I’m assured that arrows, bullets and spears don’t have a chance.”