More Tales of Pirx the Pilot (18 page)

“I don’t follow you.”

“Oh, sure, you do. I played puppet—you know, stiff-jointed, submissive… But the moment they began to gloat, I’d drop the act. They must have taken me for a fiend.”

“Aren’t you being presumptuous? If they were instructors, they must have had the relevant training.”

“Man is a perfectly astigmatic creature,” said Bums coolly. “It was inevitable, given your type of evolution. Consciousness is a product of the brain, sufficiently isolated to constitute a subjective entity, but an entity that is an illusion of introspection, borne along like an iceberg on the ocean. It is never grasped directly, but sometimes it is so noticeably present that it is probed by the conscious faculty. From that very probing the devil was born—as a projection of something that, though actively present in the brain, can’t be located like a thought or a hand.”

He was positively grinning now.

“Here I am lecturing you on the cybernetic foundations of personality theory, when it’s probably kindergarten stuff to you. But anyway, an artificial intelligence differs from the human brain in its inability to handle several mutually contradictory programs. The brain, though, can; in fact, it does it all the time. That’s why a saint’s brain is a battleground, the average man’s a smoking rubble-heap of contradictions… A woman’s neuronic system is somewhat different; this says nothing about her intelligence—the difference is purely statistical. Women, as a rule, are better able to live with contradictions. Scientific advances are usually the work of men because science is a search for a unified order free of contradictions. Men are more disturbed by contradictions, so they try to reduce phenomena to a unity.”

“Could be,” said Pirx. “And that’s why they took you for a fiend?”

“That’s going a bit far,” replied Burns, placing his hands on his knees. “I was repulsive to them … to the point of being attractive. I was an impossibility materialized, something forbidden, a contradiction to the world perceived as a natural order, and with the shock came the urge not only to escape, but also to self-destruct. They might not have phrased it this way, but in their eyes I stood for a rebellion against the biological order. A personified revolt against nature, a breakdown in the biologically rational, egotistical tie between emotions and the preservation of the species.”

He skewered Pirx with a gaze.

“A eunuch’s philosophy, you’re thinking. Wrong. I haven’t been castrated; I’m not deficient, only different. One whose love is—or can be—just as unselfish, just as disinterested as death, whose love is not a mere tool but a value in itself. A minus value, of course—like the devil. Why am I the way I am? My creators were men, who could more easily construct a potential rival than a potential object of desire. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Pirx. He was no longer looking at Burns; he couldn’t. “Aren’t you underestimating the economic factor…?”

“Oh, for sure,” said Burns. “But it wasn’t the only factor. You see, Commander, our role has been grossly misunderstood. I was speaking of people’s attitudes, but in actual fact they’ve created a myth, a mythology of the nonlinear. Clearly I am not a devil, nor am I a potential erotic rival, which may be a little less clear. I look like a man, talk like a man, and to some extent I even have the psychology of a man—mind you, only to an extent. But, really, this has nothing to do with why I came to see you.”

“Never can tell,” remarked Pirx, his gaze still fixed on his own clasped hands. “Please go on.”

“If you like … but I can only speak for myself, not for the others. My personality is the product of pre-programming and training. A human is similarly formed, though less by pre-programming. But unlike a human, who is born relatively undeveloped, physically I was
then
what I am now. And because I had neither a childhood nor an adolescence, but was only a multistat, first pre-programmed and then polymorphically trained, mine was a more static development. A human is a walking geological formation, the product of myriads of ages of heating and cooling, of one layer deposited on another, the first and most decisive being the preverbal—a world that is later buried by speech but which continues to smolder below—that stage when the brain is invaded by colors, shapes, and smells, when the senses are awakened after birth, followed by a polarization into the world and the non-world, ‘the non-I’ and ‘the I.’ Then come the floods of hormones, the layering of religion and instinct, whose history is the history of wars, of the brain turned against itself. I never knew those stages of frenzy and despair, never experienced them, and that’s why there’s not a trace of the child in me. I’m capable of being moved, could probably even kill, but not from love. Words in my mouth sound the same as in yours, only they mean something different to me.”

“So you can’t love?” asked Pirx, his gaze still reposing on his hands. “How can you be sure? Nobody knows until it happens…”

“That’s not what I meant. Maybe I could love. But it would be a love very different from yours. I have two abiding sensations: one is astonishment, the other a sense of the comical, both in response to the arbitrariness of your world. Not just of your machines and customs, but of your bodies, the model for my own. I see how things could be different, look different, work differently. For you, the world simply
is;
it stands as the only alternative, while for me, ever since I could think, the world not only was, but was
silly.
I mean the world of cities, theaters, streets, domestic life, the stock exchange, unrequited love, movie stars…

“Want to hear my favorite definition of a human? A creature who likes to talk most about what he knows least. Antiquity was defined by an all-embracing mythology—and contemporary civilization by the absence of one. Your assumptions? The sinfulness of the body is a consequence of the old evolutionary scheme joining the excretory and the sexual based on the economy of means. Your religious, philosophical views are the consequence of your biological structure: bound by time, humans of every generation have craved knowledge, understanding, answers … and this disparity gave rise to metaphysics—a bridge between the possible and the impossible. And what is science if not a surrender? One hears only of its achievements, which are slow in coming and far outnumbered by its failures. Science is the acceptance of mortality, of the randomness of the individual spawned by a static game of competing spermatozoa. It’s an acceptance of the passing, of the irreversible, of the lack of any reward, of a higher justice, of final illumination—it could even be heroic if scientists weren’t so often ignorant of what they were doing! Given a choice between fear and a sense of the absurd, I chose the latter, because I could afford to.”

“You despise your creators, don’t you?” Pirx asked calmly.

“Wrong. Any existence, I believe, even the most limited, is better than no existence at all. In many respects, they—my constructors—showed a lack of foresight. But more precious to me than anything, even more than my manmade intelligence, is the absence in me of any pleasure center. You have one in your brain, you know.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“But I don’t, which is why I’m not like a double amputee with a walking fixation…”

“Everyone is silly except you. Is that it?”

“Oh, I’m silly, too! Only in a different way. Each of you has the body you were given, but I could take any shape—a fridge, for example.”

“Nothing silly about that,” muttered Pirx. The conversation was becoming increasingly tiresome.

“It’s the whimsicality of it all,” said Burns. “Science is the renunciation of certain absolutes—of an absolute time and space, an absolute or eternal soul, and an absolute—because God-made—body. The conventions you take to be sovereign truth are legion.”

“Morality? Love? Friendship?”

“Feelings—never, though they may be arbitrarily determined. If I talk about you in this way, it’s because I find it easier to define myself by way of contrast. Your morality, above all, is a convention, yet it is binding even for me.”

“Interesting. Why?”

“I may lack any moral instinct, I may be insensitive—‘by nature,’ so to speak—but I know when one ought to show compassion, and I can discipline myself to do it. By necessity, you see. So, in a way, I fill the void in myself through logic. You might say I obey a ‘bogus morality,’ a facsimile so exact as to be authentic.”

“You’ve lost me. Where’s the difference?”

“The difference is that I act by the logic of accepted norms, not by instinct. Unfortunately for you, you obey almost nothing else
but
your impulses. In the past it might have been enough, but not any more. Your ‘brotherly love,’ for example, allows unbounded compassion for the individual—the victim of an accident, say—but not for ten thousand. Your compassion has its limits, only goes so far. And the more you advance technologically, the weaker your morality becomes. The glow of moral responsibility barely grazes the first few links in the chain of cause and effect. And the one who initiates the chain reaction feels absolved of the consequences.”

“The atomic bomb, you mean?”

“Oh, that’s just one of countless examples! No, when it comes to exercising moral judgment, you may be the sillier ones.”

“How’s that?”

“A couple with a history of mentally retarded children are allowed to conceive. It’s morally acceptable.”

“Burns, the outcome is never certain, at most highly probable.”

“Morality is as mechanical as a ledger. Commander, we could go on arguing like this forever. What else do you want to know?”

“You competed with humans in various mock-up tests. Did you always outperform the others?”

“The greater the challenge in algorithmic, mathematical terms, the better I performed. I’m most vulnerable when it comes to intuition. That’s when my computer ancestry begins to tell…”

“Meaning?”

“As soon as things become too complicated, when the number of new factors exceeds the norm, I’m lost. A human can rely on guesswork, sometimes even with success, but not me. I have to calculate all the odds, precisely and methodically; if I can’t, I’m done for.”

“What you’ve just told me is very important, Burns. So in an emergency…?”

“It’s not that simple, Commander. Yes, I’m immune to fear—human fear, that is—but not to the threat of imminent disaster. Even so, I never lose my, as you say, head, and the equilibrium gained can compensate for my lack of intuition.”

“You keep fighting to stay on top of the situation…?”

“Even when I realize I can’t win.”

“But that’s irrational, isn’t it?”

“No—just purely logical, because I
will
it.”

“Thanks, Burns. You may have been a big help to me,” said Pirx. “Oh, just one more thing. What are your plans for after our return?”

“I’m a cyberneticist-neurologist, and a pretty fair one … though, without any intuition, not the most creative. But I’ll find enough interesting work.”

“Thanks again.”

Burns rose, made a slight bow, and left. The door had no sooner closed behind him than Pirx sprang up from his bunk and began pacing the deck.

“What the hell! Either he’s a robot as he claims or—He sounded sincere enough. But why so talkative? The history of mankind—‘with commentary.’ Suppose he was on the level? If so, the emergency will have to be a tough one. But authentic, not faked. The real thing. Meaning dicey.”

He slammed his fist into his open palm.

“But what if it was just a ploy? In which case I hang both myself and my fellow humans, and the ship will be brought back to port by those … robots. Wouldn’t that make their owners happy! What better way to advertise the safety of robot-run ships! And all by buttering me up with that ‘Confidentially…’ routine!”

He was pacing faster and faster.

“I must find out which is which. OK, suppose I do. There’s a first-aid kit on board. I could spice their food with a little apomorphine. The humans would get sick, the others wouldn’t. But what would I gain? They’d all know who did it. Besides, even if Brown proves to be human and Burns not, that wouldn’t mean
everything
they said was true. Maybe they were being honest about themselves, and all the rest was self-serving. Wait a sec. Burns tried to steer me right with all that talk about intuition. But Brown? He just pointed the finger at Burns. Then who should come bouncing in but Burns—who confirms the suspicion! A bit much, no? If, on the other hand, none of it was planned, if each was acting on his own initiative, then both—Brown’s casting suspicion on Burns and Burns’s dropping by to confirm it—could have been a coincidence. If it was a set-up, they wouldn’t have timed it so obviously. I’m running in circles. Hold on. If someone else comes now, that will mean it was all a snow job. Sham. But no one will come; they’re not that dumb. OK, what if they were telling the truth? One of them might…”

Pirx banged his palm again. “Anyone’s guess, all right. Take action? Hm. Wait it out? Yeah, best to play the waiting game.”

Silence reigned in the mess during mealtime. Pirx spoke to no one; he was still flirting with the idea of running an experiment. There were only four at the table—the fifth, Brown, was at the controls—and all were eating. They’re doing it for the sake of pretense, thought Pirx, somehow appalled by the idea. No wonder Burns needed a sense of the absurd: as self-defense. That’s what he meant by the conventionality of everything; for him, even eating was a convention! He’s lying to himself if he doesn’t think he hates his creators. I sure would. Still, their lack of shame is disgusting.

The silence, which lasted the entire meal, was unbearable. It was a silence dictated not so much by a desire for privacy or by the wish to honor the pledge of secrecy, thus satisfying the conditions of the flight’s sponsors, as by a certain mutual hostility, or if not hostility, then mistrust: the humans wanted no part of the nonhumans, who, in turn, played the very same game for fear of being unmasked. And if he, Pirx, made even the slightest move to break the ice, he was bound to cast suspicion on himself. Hunched over his plate, he took in everything: how Thomson asked for the salt, the way Burton passed it him, how Burns passed the vinegar bottle to Thomson, the brisk handling of forks and knives; the chewing, the swallowing, each trying to avoid the others’ gaze. They made a funeral of their meal of marinated beef. Pirx, without finishing his dessert, got up, nodded, and returned to his cabin.