I began to wonder, the day she asked me, "You bounced high to Jericho?" The day, secure in implication and containment, that she explained, "A runcible spoon is what you eat mince and quince with." The moment, overnight, she acquired cause and effect, exclaiming in hurt wonder, "The rose is sick because the worm eated it!"
It seemed enough of an act to call for witnesses. I could hear, in my mind's ear, my parents saying, "Ricky, go get your cello and play for the guests." I swore, at that age, that in the unlikely event I ever did something as mad as having children, I would never subject them to such humiliation. The lightest training in pride revised my resolution.
Lentz was on his afternoon visit to the nursing home. I rustled up Harold to come have a look. He arrived, gawky daughter in tow. With what remained of a memory that had gone senescent in the last year, I greeted her. "Hello, Trish."
She gave an insulted gagging noise. "Render me roguish. Turf me in all quadrants."
"I'm sorry?"
"This is Mina," Harold intervened. "And your name is mud."
"Oh. I'm sorry. I was sure I—"
"You're not the first one to confuse them."
Mina snorted again, a sound replete with connotations. "We're nothing at all alike. Trish is the stuck-up, snobby bitch."
"And Mina is the sweet one, as you see."
We read Helen "The Emperor's New Clothes." Mina was bored by the text, overfamiliar, although she had never heard it except in paraphrase. She prowled around the office until she found a copy of Rumelhart and McClelland to nose around in. Harold shook his head as I read. He didn't believe that the occasional sound and light emitting from Helen had anything to do with the words I read her.
The story ended. Maybe the only universally valid generalization about stories: they end. I felt like a showman. I turned to Harold and Mina, whose interest was again piqued. "So what do you want to know?"
Harold breathed out, hard. "You've got to be kidding." He looked around for the hidden cameras. Then he took his leap of faith. "Who told the emperor he was naked?"
I repeated the question to Helen, verbatim. She turned it over forever. She slowed a little with each new association she fit into the web. One day she would grow so worldly she would come to a full stop. Now, in front of a captive audience, she seemed to ossify before her time.
I slipped deeper into dismay with each agonizing cycle-tick. At long last, she decided. "The little child told the emperor."
Both father and daughter almost exploded. "Hoo-wee!" Harold sobered first. He began reasoning out loud. Reason: the ex post facto smoother-over of the cacophony exploding across our subsystems.
"Okay. Let's assume you guys are playing fair. That none of this is canned."
"Good assumption," I said, conscious of sounding like a poor parody of Lentz.
"The entire story never uses the word 'naked.' Well, maybe you've built a kind of thesaurus structure. ."
"She built it herself."
Mina stopped biting her cuticle. "Maybe it has, you know, like a cheat sheet of questions people might ask?"
"Good thinking, kiddo." Harold tried to pat her head, but she pulled away. "Did you choose the story at random?" he grilled me.
"It was next on the list."
"No telegraph?"
"None."
Mina fluttered her hands. "I didn't mean that he fed it specific questions. I just meant, like, it has a list of how to deal with 'Who is' and 'What is,' and all those."
Harold looked at me: You sure you haven't been piping info to the physical symbol systems? I knew his suspicion of operationalism. He often accused Lentz of playing fast and loose with the computational model of mind.
'There aren't that many 'whos' in the story," Mina elaborated. "Maybe she got lucky."
I turned to Helen and asked, "What are the new clothes made of?"
After a long time, she answered, "The clothes are made of threads of ideas."
"It's a nice way of putting it," Harold offered. But the error's strangeness relieved him.
I felt myself edging toward humiliation. I needed one good answer to show them what my girl could do. "Why don't the subjects who see the emperor naked tell him that he has nothing on?"
Both syntax and semantic here ran beyond words. If she could swallow the sentence without spitting up, we'd wow the home crowd for good.
This time, Helen answered too quickly to have thought about the sentence at all. 'The subjects are snagged in a textile."
I didn't even try to apologize for her. "Do you like the emperor's new clothes?" I wasn't sure what I was after. If she could remain composed, answer anything to a sentence with so vague a referent, it might salvage mechanism and save the day for function.
Helen's answer sent Mina into hysterics. "Did you hear that? Did you hear what it said?"
Harold twisted his mouth, amused, despite himself, by the girl's uncontrollable fit. "Yes. She said, 'Very much.' What's so funny about that?"
"She didn't! She said, 'Airy much.' Airy. Get it?"
"Oh, for heaven's sake. You're hearing things, kid."
"Daddy!"
They both looked at me, the tiebreaker. "To tell you the God's honest truth, I thought she said, 'Fairy Dutch.' "
When she caught her breath again, Mina declared, "That's the smartest parrot I've ever seen."
Harold shook his head in bewilderment. "Mere parroting would have been impressive enough. One already wonders what survival value for a cockatiel the ability to whistle the Saber Dance might have. How such a bizarre skill could earn its place in such limited circuitry. Rearranging sentence components while preserving grammar ups the ante an order of magnitude. Creating novel sentences in response to a semantic field—"
"We still have a few kinks to work out."
"Listen." Harold fell into the agitated intensity of a scientist impatient with methodology. "Can we try something here?"
"Of course. Name it."
He looked sidelong at me. Not wanting to overstep. "Kahneman and Tversky?"
I smiled. Funny: Harold would not be impressed with my matching the obscure tags, recent additions to my own neural library. He took that much for granted. Just your garden-variety marvel.
I improvised for Helen a personal variation on the now-classic test. "Jan is thirty-two years old. She is well educated and holds two advanced degrees. She is single, is strong-minded, and speaks her piece. In college, she worked actively for civil rights. Which of these two statements is more likely? One: Jan is a librarian. Two: Jan is a librarian and a feminist."
"It knows the word 'feminist'?" Mina lit up, arcing into existence at the idea.
"I think so. She's also very good at extending through context."
Once more, Helen answered with a speed that winded me, given the pattern-sorting she needed to reach home. "One: Jan is a librarian."
Harold and I exchanged looks. Meaning?
"Why is that more likely, Helen?"
"Helen? It has a name?"
"That is more likely because one Jan is more likely than two."
Now Harold took a turn laughing like an idiot.
"Wait a minute," Mina said. "I don't get it. What's the right answer?"
"What do you mean, what's the right answer?" Harold, raging affronted fatherdom. "Think about it for ten seconds."
"Well, she has all these feminist things about her. So isn't it more likely that she would be a feminist librarian than just a…?"
Mina, seeing herself about to label the part more likely than its whole, threw her hand over her mouth and reddened.
"I can't believe it. I've worked my mental fingers to the bone for you, daughter."
Harold's growl was motley at best. Helen, choosing the right answer for the wrong reasons, condemned herself to another lifetime of machinehood. Harold's girl, in picking wrongly for the right reasons, leaped uniquely human.