‘Well sure it applies to religion, we had all about that last week in Computer Appreciation, they said in 1963 a computer proved that not all of St Paul’s epistles were by the same hand.’
‘Big deal, so he was ambidextrous.’
‘Or maybe it proved they were all by the same hand, I forget which. Anyway the computer proved it, whatever it was.’
‘Hey, and Pascal, right after he invented the first adding machine, he got “born again” as a Jansenist.’
‘I thought Pascal was a language — but what about the big Mormon computer storing up the names of all the dead people in the whole world?’
‘What about Leibniz, he built the first four-function calculator, and he proved the existence of God. And he invented binary numbers. On the other hand, he must not have been too religious, his treatise on ethics turned out to be plagiarized.’
‘What about the rosary? Wasn’t that the first religious calculating device? The Catholic abacus, somebody called it…’
‘Well I still say cybernetics doesn’t apply to religion, I mean they haven’t even got computer-generated music in the liturgy have they.?’
‘Yeah, well, you wouldn’t be happy even if they had a robot pope, like in that Robert Silverberg story. You’d want a robot canonized too.’
‘Ask Robbie here what he thinks, does he want to be a saint?’
‘Leave Robbie alone,’ said the boy in the sweatshirt marked FYN. ‘He don’t have to think about nothing, he’s our mascot. Our own personal robot mascot. Right, Robbie?’
The silent, unthirsty one, who wore an identical sweatshirt, nodded. ‘Right, master.’
‘He’s no robot,’ said somebody else. ‘He was playing ping-pong a minute ago, he’s just one of your pledges helping you pull a stunt. Robots can’t play ping-pong.’
‘That’s all you know, look in his mouth. Robbie, open wide.’
The mascot opened his mouth for inspection.
‘Hey, he ain’t got no tongue! No throat! Just a, what is that, a speaker?’
‘Okay, I’m impressed. Only where did you get Robbie? He must be worth millions, a robot that good. I mean I work over at the bio-engineering lab, I know how hard it is to get a robot to walk around normally in the real world, let alone play ping-pong. So how come it’s your mascot?’
‘Fraternity secret. Robbie, go wait for me in the lounge. Just sit down in there and wait for me.’
‘Yes, master.’
‘I’m impressed, I’m impressed. There he goes, sits down you didn’t even tell him to sit in a chair, but he’s doing it. Boy, he is worth millions.’
The mascot sat down in the lounge, rested one hand on each arm of the chair, and stared straight ahead of him. He took no notice of the couple sitting nearby, nor they of him; they were engrossed in the little statue in the corner.
‘…and that’s what’s so peculiar, it’s a copy of a copy, an effigy representing a doll. I mean the original Infant of Prague was a statue of Baby Jesus that they clothed in real finery, brocade and jewels and a gold crown — but this, this is just plaster painted to look like finery: a statue not of Jesus but of a robed doll. There’s something uncanny about it, it’s like making a waxwork model of a robot,’ said the boy.
The girl replied, ‘The word comes from Prague too. Prague
keeps getting associated with effigies, one way or another. There was the famous golem of Rabbi Löw of Prague, back in the sixteenth century. It was made of clay, and he brought it to life by putting this amulet under its tongue a paper with the secret name of God or something like that. The golem works for him, runs errands and so on, but on the Sabbath he has to remove the amulet and put it to rest. One Sabbath he forgets; the golem gets out of control and goes rampaging around Prague. Finally he gets it deprogrammed and puts it away in the attic of the synagogue, never to be brought to life again.’
‘A legend with a moral?’
‘Yes but Rabbi Low was a real man, he died in 1609. About thirty years later, Descartes was suddenly talking and writing about automata.’
He looked at her. ‘Descartes? What’s the connection?’
‘Descartes fought in the Battle of Prague! His side won, and he marched into the city in 1620. Did he hear of the golem? Did he buy it? Did he loot the synagogue? We know he was interested in all sciences; had he heard of the golem, he would almost certainly have tried to see it, if not acquire it. Anyway, in 1637 he wrote about automata, saying that automaton monkeys could not be distinguished from real ones.’
‘An experimental observation?’
‘Why not? Three years later, he was making a sea voyage, taking along an automaton girl, whom he called “ma fille Francine”.’
‘Too good to be true! What happened to her?’
‘Destroyed by superstition. He brought her aboard the ship in a box. The captain peeked inside, saw her move, and, thinking her the work of the Devil, threw her overboard.’
‘Another mystery of Prague down the drain,’ he said.
‘Three centuries later Karel Čapek put on his play R.U.R. in Prague, and added the word robot to the world’s vocabulary. Čapek was born in Prague, too.’
‘It’s always Prague — the Infant, the golem, Rossum’s Universal Robots — you begin to wonder what was really going on there?’
Outside it was spring, warm enough for students to lie on the lawn with bag lunches and define their terms in arguments, if they were not better occupied cuddling or daydreaming or dozing or throwing frisbees.
‘…a surrealist musical, he calls it Hello Dali…’
‘But hey listen, the Golden Section…’
‘Basically I guess I must be a Manichee, I always see two sides to everything…’
‘…this Golden Section, this computer worked it out to thousands of decimal places, I still don’t know what it is exactly…’
‘…to match up these thousands of potsherds, only the program went wrong. That or else the Beaker people made a beaker without a mouth, so much for Keats…’
‘La vie électrique, by Albert Robida.’
‘Br’er Robbie…?’
‘Ah ah ah!’
Someone sneezed, someone spoke of spring the sweet spring. A frisbee player stepped on a tuna salad sandwich. Someone looking quickly through a book on Rodin remarked that some of his stuff wouldn’t be bad when it was finished.
A few heads turned as a woman in white passed. Her long hair, in sunlight the colour of clean copper, hung long over her shoulders and back, all but obscuring the legend on the back of her white coveralls: SANDRO’S SHELL SERVICE.
Down the line, heads were turning for a different reason as Lyle Tate passed, coming the other way. The birthmark down his cheek was darker than usual because he was angry; it rendered one side of his face a mask of infinite fury, its eye weeping ink. He and the woman in white met by the frisbee players.
‘What is it? Weren’t we meeting at the Faculty Club bar?’
‘Nothing, I just can’t — we’ll have to go have lunch somewhere else, Shirl.’
‘Lyle, what’s wrong?’
‘I met that sonofabitch Gary Indiana, that’s all. I just can’t stay in the room with him, not after what he did to my one-man show, did you see his review?’
‘No. Look let’s skip lunch, we can just sit down here on the grass and talk this out, can’t we?’
He sat down but continued to wave a clipping from a slick art magazine. ‘After this I’ll be lucky if the department doesn’t drop me, that’s all.’
‘It looks like a long review for a bad one.’
His face twisted more. ‘That’s the worst of it, he pretends to like my work, then tears it apart — I mean for instance getting the titles of the paintings wrong! Cigar Tragic he changes to Cigarette Tragedy, the palindrome was the whole point of the title, the whole painting is a visual palindrome with Castro’s exploding Havana mirroring the vaudeville gag, was trying to show the comic-book minds behind it, but no not only does he change the name he spends half the review talking about America’s position on puppet governments, turns out to be some fucking speech he ghosted for General Fleischman — you see what I’m up against? And he claims it’s all some problem with his word processor, a page of speech got slipped in by mistake. Can that happen?’