Turing Test

by Chris Beckett

  Han turned back to the time machine.

  “How on earth does it work?” he wondered.

  “No idea, but then I’ve never understood how a TV set works either,” shrugged my father, the owner of the planet’s largest broadcasting company and its second largest electronics manufacturer. “That’s for the boffins. The important thing is how you use it!”

  *

  “So where are we going to go?” asked Dad, later that evening, after a meal under the stars, moored off a Turkish beach. “What are the big events in this part of the world? You tell us Alex, you’re the one with the history splice!”

  I felt hi-jacked. That was what I wanted to say. I’d been quite happy just wandering around the blue sea in the two dimensions of horizontal space, and letting my imagination do the rest. I didn’t need this time travel gimmick. It was like someone barging in with a house-sized chocolate cake, a stripper and a brass band when you are enjoying a quiet little dinner for two.

  But I recognised I was in a minority of one on this, so I moderated my lack of enthusiasm and confined myself to merely putting a damper on the proceedings.

  “You know,” I said, “people always want to go back to the big showy set pieces: the crucifixion, or the sack of Jerusalem, or the fall of Troy or something. But that isn’t really what history is all about. Those are just the earthquakes, the very occasional explosions when the tensions build up and have to be released. Almost all of history is really just people going about their daily lives. If I’m going to go back in time I’d rather just visit some ordinary little place and see what ordinary life was like for them.”

  Dad gave an outraged roar.

  “Of all the prissy, priggish rubbish! What utter nonsense! Come on now, Alex, you mentioned Troy, isn’t that somewhere round here? That’d be something! We’ll go back to the sack of Troy.”

  “Troy! Wow!” breathed Han. “Think of that Alex!”

  “That’s the spirit, Hannibal!” Dad exclaimed, and turned to me. “I thought this guy was a drip when you first brought him home, Alex, I make no bones about it. But it looks like he’s got more spirit than you have.”

  *

  Early next morning we were opposite Troy. If Han and I had been left alone to savour it, there would have been something quite magical about it: a sea as smooth as glass, islands in the hazy distance, the Aegean coast stretching away south, the mouth of the Dardanelles…. everything very still and softly luminous. And in the distance, across a pale plain of wheat and poppy flowers, was Hisarlík, a small hill, or really just a mound, which you would hardly notice at all if you didn’t know that it was the site of nine cities, each built on the ruins of the last, spanning a period of four thousand years from the Bronze age to the early Christian Era.

  I would have enjoyed a morning just soaking all that in. But Dad as ever was busy, busy, busy.

  “Right then, gun, torch and force shield each, but we can sort that out later. Mehmet, we need to prepare the Croesus for quite a jolt. Now let’s figure out how to use this thing. Alex, you’re the history expert. Tell us what date to aim for.”

  “1242 b.c.” I said, using that strange numb kind of knowledge that comes with a splice. (You can’t feel it. It isn’t part of you. It isn’t woven together with other knowledge to become part of your intuitions and dreams. But when you look for it, suddenly it is there, and your own mouth is speaking it.) “Until about twenty years ago, no-one could have given an exact date and there were serious doubts as to whether there was any historical basis to the Homeric story at all. But, following the discovery of molecular memory…”

  “1242 b.c.?” Dad, Mehmet and Han were all squatting round the time machine like little boys, trying to work out how to operate the controls and interpret the colourful displays.

  “Right,” my father commanded. “Take a seat and hold on tight.”

  Mehmet muttered something that ended with ‘Allah.’

  There was a spine-jolting crack, as if the boat had dropped from several metres up in the air, and then a sudden temperature drop and a few seconds of violent rocking.

  I had closed my eyes like I always do on things like rides at fairs, and now I cautiously opened them.

  *

  It was evening. Eerily spot-lit by the sun setting behind us, the landscape opposite was recognisably the same as before, and yet it was totally other in a way that sent goosebumps up and down my spine. The plain was brown and scorched where it had been green. There were no houses, but on the hill of Hisarlík, which had been no more than a sort of stump, there stood a wondrous structure gleaming in the sun. It was the still unvanquished Troy, its high walls faced from top to bottom with shining tiles, its mighty gates of bronze blazing with solar fire.

  Little groans of awe came from the others. Even my father was silent as we struggled to take this experience in.

  “Look,” said Han, “the Greek camp!”

  We followed his gaze northwards to a dark city of tents and bonfires at the edge of the plain, with boats moored alongside. And then, almost simultaneously, we all exclaimed “The Horse!”

  It wasn’t just a story! There it was, towering over the camp, lit by bonfires and the setting sun.

  *

  We left Mehmet in charge of the Croesus. We all had powerful walkie-talkies we could call him on and Dad instructed him to go back to our own era and get help if at any point he lost touch with us. (Dad was confident that the Croesus’ own formidable array of security devices would be more than a match for any surprise attack on the yacht itself). Then Dad, Han and myself went ashore in the tender, heading for the Greek camp.

  What happened in the next few hours was so bizarre, so far beyond anything in my experience that much of it has become an incoherent and unreliable jumble, like scenes from early childhood, which I suppose is also a time when human beings find themselves in a strange and unfamiliar world.

  I remember the camp stank of shit and ash and rotting meat. I remember heads on poles, some rotted to the bone, others still with skin and hair and eye sockets heaving with flies. I remember scrawny dogs and scrawny chickens and dirty little feral children. I remember captives tethered to wooden stakes, listless, fly-encrusted, some of them blinded or with severed limbs. I also seem to remember dismantled roundabouts and bits of ghost train and stacked sections of dodgems and waltzers. But I suppose that’s because the whole place reminded me of a fairground being packed away after the fair is over. Everything was being taken down, stacked, loaded into the little wooden boats that lined the shore.

  The Greeks had of course seen the Croesus appear in the distance, and observed our approach. We were surrounded as soon as we landed by hard, skinny little men with jagged bronze-tipped spears. I think they intended to skewer us there and then. Han and I had our fingers on the button of our force shields. Han’s face was white as a corpse and probably mine was too, but Dad, who seemed to be enjoying himself enormously, switched his torch on to give a five second blast of artificial lightening and ear-splitting artificial thunder. All the Greeks screamed and ran for their lives except for a single one, taller and fairer than the others, who stubbornly stood his ground. He was a member of the ruling class it seemed, in Homeric terms a ‘king’, though probably the king of no more than some impoverished mountain village somewhere, or some tiny island.

  “Who are you and why are you upheaved on the rim of the drinking vessel?” he demanded.

  My splice could handle Modern Greek, New Testament Greek and Homeric Greek, but it struggled for a while before it mastered a Greek from times so ancient that even in Homer’s day they were the stuff of legend. My father’s translator clearly couldn’t handle it at all because he poked irritably at the thing a few times, shook it and then, utterly characteristically, tossed it away with a gesture of impatience and contempt.

  “Tell him we come from another world, Alex. Tell him we know about the horse and we know it’s going to work because we can see the future.”

  I repeat
ed this and the man seemed to understand at least enough of whatever it was that came out of my mouth to look surprised and alarmed when I said the bit about the horse. I suppose it wasn’t meant to be common knowledge.

  “Come with me. I will herd you to the nipple of the pine tree,” he told me.

  The other Greeks had started creeping cautiously back. One was poking gingerly with his spear at Dad’s discarded translator.

  We followed, Dad impatiently badgering me for information so that he could stay in control.

  “What did he say, Alex? Where are we going? Tell him we want to go in the horse.”

  But I bided my time, enjoying the experience – even in this context – of my father being dependent on me. A short while later were in the presence of a group of bearded and grim-looking patriarchs, sitting on rugs and being fussed over by semi-naked slave-boys and slave-girls.

  “Tell them you and Hannibal want to be in the horse.”

  “Me and Han? What about you.”

  “No, no. This is your adventure Alex.”

  I shrugged, affecting an indifference which I certainly did not feel, and made the request as asked to the assembled Achaean dignitaries.

  There was a lot of head-shaking and doubtful sucking in of breath.

  “Tell him you have great powers,” Dad said.

  So I did, and we demonstrated for them the torches, the laser guns and the force shields. They were impressed, especially by the torch. They were much too dignified and aristocratic to run, but the fake thunder made them first go grey and stiff and then explode into a babble of animated debate. How they wished they could own such a thing! (Oddly the force shields interested them rather less, and one of them even claimed to have possessed such a thing himself since babyhood).

  “Tell them they can have my torch if they let you and Han go in the horse,” Dad said.

  “How do you know I want to go in the damn horse?” I demanded.

  But Han said, “Come on Alex, the Trojan Horse, for God’s sake!”

  So I passed on Dad’s offer to the senior king. His eyes lit up with excitement like a little boy and he agreed to the deal at once, reaching out greedily for the toy to be placed into his hands.

  We phoned Mehmet and told him what we’d arranged.

  *

  The time in the horse was hell. Thirty six hours in a baking windowless box stinking of sweat and halitosis and, increasingly as the time went by, of the urine that soaked into the layers of leather and wool which had been packed in to stop tell-tale drips from appearing underneath the horse. There was nothing to eat but strips of stinking dried fish and nothing to drink but mouthfuls of water that tasted as if it had been scooped from a ditch. While we waited for the Trojans, I had the whispered conversations of the Greeks to regale me as they discussed the booty they would capture, the cruelties they would inflict, the destruction they would unleash and the lip-smacking smorgasbord of rape that lay before them.

  “Little girls,” one of them said, “really little girls. They’re lovely and tight and you don’t have to work so hard to hold them down.”

  “This is long ago,” I kept reminding myself. “All these people were dead and buried and forgotten a thousand years before Christ.”

  Then the Trojans came and we had to remain silent for hours in the hottest part of the day, waiting for the horse to move. After that came hours of jolting about as we were dragged slowly across the plain and into the city. And then at last, as night fell, silence returned outside.

  Finally the time came. Our leader, an especially grim and dour-looking man named Uxos, opened a hatch. Then he and two others dropped down into the darkness below. We heard faint choking sounds and when finally Han and I lowered ourselves down, there were three Trojans sprawled down there in black pools of their own blood.

  “This isn’t happening now,” I told myself again, “this is three thousand years ago.”

  The relief of emerging into the cool night air was so immense in any case that I could have tolerated almost anything.

  “Right,” said Uxos, “you two strangers come with me and Achios to the gates.”

  The rest of the Greeks dispersed through the town.

  *

  I hadn’t anticipated Troy would be so beautiful. Softly lit by lamps, the deserted streets were lined with big, graceful, well-constructed houses, decorated with carved designs of people and animals and gods which had been picked out in coloured paints or sometimes in gold leaf. There were little gardens and pools with stone benches beside them under trees. There were statues and little shrines

  As Han and I followed Uxos and Achios, his young sidekick, I thought of the Trojans sleeping behind these walls, grandparents, children, babies, peacefully sleeping and not knowing that this would be the last hour of peace in their lives. I imagined an old man snoring beside his arthritic wife, a young woman returning a sleeping baby to a cot, a little girl with her arm around a worn old doll, wriggling into a more comfortable position…

  “This is all long ago,” I again tried to reassure myself.

  But I was not much comforted. And I thought of the dirty little soldiers gathering outside the walls with their jagged blades and their lewd and murderous dreams.

  Han, meanwhile, seemed to be in a different mental universe.

  “This is so brilliant, Alex!” he whispered. “I keep telling myself over and over that we’re really here! We’re in the legend! We were in the wooden horse itself!”

  Being really there was what he said excited him, but he wasn’t really there. It was all just some sort of fancy VR game to him. Actuality itself was just a particularly brilliant graphics package.

  But then, not having a splice, he hadn’t heard what the soldiers were saying inside the horse.

  *

  Another unexpected thing about Troy was that it was very small. We were soon facing the city wall and the enormous bronze gates, where a single Trojan soldier stood on duty in a small square lined with trees. The Trojans had never expected an attack from inside. And yesterday they’d seen the Greeks apparently sailing away, leaving nothing behind them but their midden heaps and their strange wooden horse. So they weren’t really expecting an attack at all.

  Uxos beckoned to Han and I to keep down while he and his lieutenant crept up to the gates, Achios going to the right and Uxos to the left.

  They had it all worked out. Dissolving into the darkness under the trees, Achios emerged right in front of the sleepy sentry and softly called out to him. The man jumped slightly then peered into the darkness to see who it was. But before he could say or do anything else, Uxos had run silently out from the trees behind him, pulled back his head with a hand over his mouth, and dragged a blade across his throat.

  As Uxos let him fall, Achios was already climbing up onto the lower of the two great bars that held the gates closed and was reaching up to push at the higher one. Uxos ran to join him and very quickly they had worked it loose and slid it back. Then they jumped down and heaved together at the lower bar.

  As it came free, Hannibal leapt to his feet and punched his fist into the air with a triumphant, puerile “Yes!”

  I couldn’t bear to look at his face.

  There was a shout from the top of the wall. A sentry up there had finally realised that something was going on. But it was far too late. The gates were swinging open. (Hannibal ran to give them a hand.) Outside in the darkness, one firebrand after another was bursting into flames to reveal the hungry, leering faces of the Greeks.

  They all let out a cheer.

  And there, right up in front, cheering with the rest of them, was my Dad, like a banal, benevolent giant, like something out of a comic book, his whole face lit up by boyish delight.

  *

  We didn’t actually participate in the rape and pillage. As the Greeks streamed shrieking in, Dad fell back. Han and I joined him and we went back to the tender and rejoined Mehmet on the Croesus.

  Dawn was breaking over the plundered city as w
e settled in our seats to return to our own time. Smoke was pouring into the sky from within those immaculate porcelain walls, and there was a faint high sound wafting towards us over the sea. It sounded like whistling wind. It sounded like weather. It sounded like nothing of any consequence at all. But in fact it was human. It was human voices. It was the bland amalgam of hundreds and hundreds of terrified and despairing screams.

  Then we were back in the present, in the very moment from which we had left. There were fields of wheat and poppies, and the city, that focal point of agony, was now just the peaceful and nondescript mound of Hisarlík, where nothing much more distressing had happened for hundreds of years than a tourist mislaying his camera case.

  “Well!” exclaimed my dad. “That calls for a large breakfast I think. Do you think you could rustle up something, Mehmet? Plenty of cholesterol, plenty of calories and loads of strong coffee. Splendid. Now admit it boys, you don’t get an experience like that every day!”

  And he phoned his people in Istanbul to send back a helicopter to lift him off. There was a TV company in Bulgaria he was hoping to acquire.

  *

  “Smoke?” said Han, as Dad finally disappeared over the horizon. “Smoke and then a long sleep, maybe?”

  He got out tobacco and dope and started to roll up. We were sitting at the stern under the canopy. Mehmet was washing the fore deck, keeping, as always, carefully out of our way.

  “So where next?” said Han, pausing before lighting up. “That was just incredible! Your Dad is incredible. This has been the most incredible trip of my entire life.”

  “I think I’ll pass on the smoke,” I said.

  “High enough already, eh?” said Han. “You’re right. I’ll save it for later. Maybe we should get some sleep and then think about where we’re going?”