Venus on the Half-Shell

12 ELDER SISTER PLUM

On the way to the planet Dokal, Simon and Chworktap had had their first quarrel. The second day out, Simon had found her wearing a pair of earphones at the control board. Her fingers were dancing over the keys, and the communication screen was flashing messages in Chinese. Simon could read only a few logographs and those slowly, so he had to ask her what she was doing.

She couldn’t hear, of course, but he finally put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed a few times. She looked up and then removed the phones.

“What’s upsetting you?” she said.

Simon had been in a bad enough temper before. Her instant detection of his state of temper made him more angry. He was beginning to find this sensitivity disconcerting. It was too much like mind-reading.

“For one thing,” he said, “I had a hard night, I kept dreaming that a lot of dead people were trying to talk to me all at once. For another thing, I’m getting fed up with stepping in Anubis’ crap. I’ve tried to house-break him, but he’s unteachable. A spaceship is no place for a dog, and when I think that this might go on for a thousand years…”

“Put him in a cage.”

“That’d break his heart,” Simon said. “I couldn’t be cruel to him.”

“Then adjust to it,” Chworktap said. “What’s the third thing that’s bothering you?”

“Nothing,” he said, knowing his denial would be rejected. “I just wanted to know what you’re doing. After all, I am captain of this ship, and I don’t want you monkeying around with the navigation.”

“You’re jealous because I’m smarter than you and so can read Chinese so easily,” she said. “That’s why you’re questioning me.”

“If you’re so smart, you’d know better than to tell me that.”

“I thought you liked a candid woman.”

“There are reasonable limits to candor,” he said, his face reddening.

“O.K.,” she said, “I won’t mention that again.”

“Dammit, now you’re accusing me of having a swollen male ego!”

“And you like to think you don’t,” Chworktap said. “O.K., so you’re not perfect.”

“Only a machine can be perfect!”

Simon at once regretted saying this, but it was too late, as always. Tears ran down her cheeks.

“Is that an unconscious or a deliberate reaction?” he said. “Can you turn on the tears when you want me to feel like an ass?”

“My master didn’t like tears, so I always held them back,” she said. “But you’re not my master; you’re my lover. Besides, Earthwomen, so you’ve told me, can turn on tears at will. And they’re not machines.”

Simon put his hand on her shoulder again and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. And I don’t think of you as a machine.”

“Your lying circuits are working overtime,” Chworktap said. “And you’re still angry. Why are you so solicitous about a dog’s feelings but deliberately hurt mine?”

“I suppose because I’m taking out my anger at him on you,” Simon said. “He wouldn’t know why I was chewing him out.”

“You’re ashamed of your anger and so you’re trying to get me mad so I’ll chew you out and punish you for it,” Chworktap said. “Do you feel a large hole where your ass used to be?”

“No, it’s bigger than ever,” he said, and he laughed.

“But you’re still angry,” Chworktap said, and shrugged.

“No, I’m not. Yes, I am. But not at you.”

“My radar tells me you are angry, but it’s not sensitive enough to tell me whom you’re angry at. You asked what I was doing. I’m trying to determine if Tzu Li has self-consciousness.”

Tzu Li, or Elder Sister Plum, were the key words spoken or punched when the operator wanted to open communication with the ship’s computer. Simon had often wondered why the captain had picked out that name for the computer. He could have been poetically inclined, or he could have had a sister by that name who’d bossed him around and so he had been getting a vicarious revenge by bossing this Tzu Li.

“What makes you think she is anything but a computer?” Simon said.

“She keeps making little comments when she replies. They’re not necessary, and they sound sarcastic or, sometimes, plaintive.”

“She’s starting to break down!” Simon said. “I hope not! I haven’t the slightest idea how to repair her!”

“I know how,” Chworktap said, and this made Simon angrier.

“Well then, fix her.”

“But Tzu Li may not be malfunctioning. Or, if it is a malfunction, it may be benign. After all, it was a blow on my head that scrambled my circuits and made me self-conscious.”

“No way,” Simon said. “Complicated as that computer is, it’s as simple as A-B-C compared to the complexity of your brain. You might as well tell me that a turtle could be hit on the head and wake up with self-consciousness.”

“Who knows?”

“It’s identification!” Simon said. “Tzu Li’s a machine, and you’d like to have a companion! Next you’ll be telling me your screwdriver is hollering for help!”

“How would you like my screwdriver all the way in and up and Roger, over?”

Chworktap certainly did not talk like a cool, perfectly logical robot. This was understandable, since she was not one. Simon felt that he had been unjust. To distract her, he said, “This reminds me of a novel by Jonathan Swift Somers III. It was one of a very popular series which Somers wrote about Ralph von Wau Wau.”

Ralph was a German police dog born in Hamburg. He spent his early years training with the Polizei, but when he was two he was chosen to be the subject of experiments by the scientists of das Institut und die Tankstelle für Gehirntaschenspieler. After his brain had been operated on, Ralph had an I.Q. of 200. This was considerably higher than any of the policemen’s who worked him or, for that matter, the police chief’s or the mayor’s. Naturally, he became discontented and quit the force. He went into business for himself and became the most famous private eye of all time.

Adept at disguise, he could pose as a man or a dog and, in one celebrated case, passed himself off as a Shetland pony. He acquired a luxurious apartment with a portable gold hydrant and three lovely bitches of different breeds. One of these, Samantha die Gestäupte, became his partner. She was the heroine in the best-selling A Fat, Worse than Death, in which she saved Ralph, who had been captured by the master villain, A Fat.

After eight novels, Ralph retired from detective work. The heavy drinking which was obligatory for all private eyes was turning him into an alcoholic. After a long vacation, Ralph, bored with his violin-playing and chemical researches, took a job as reporter for the Kosmos Klatschbase. He quickly rose to the top of his profession since he could get into places barred to human reporters, including men’s or women’s rest rooms. In the nineteenth of the series, No Nose Means Bad News, Ralph won the Pulitzer Prize, no easy feat, since he was not an American citizen. At its end, he decided to quit the newspaper business, since the heavy drinking obligatory for a reporter was turning him into an alcoholic, which, in turn, was causing him to be impotent.

Off the juice, though still able to handle only one bitch, Ralph toured the world in What Am I Doing on Your Table? While in China, he became appalled at the custom of eating dogs and waged a one-canine war against it.

“In fact,” Simon said, “it was this novel that aroused world opinion to such a fever that China was forced to abolish canivorousness. In the novel Ralph wins the Nobel Peace Prize, but in actuality Somers won it for writing the novel.

“But it didn’t do the dogs that were let loose much good. They became such a nuisance they had to be rounded up and gassed. And the price of beef went sky-high due to the shortage of meat.”

In the twenty-first of the series, A Fat in the Fire, Ralph and his constant companion were still in China. Ralph had become interested in Chinese poetry and was trying his paw at composing verses. But he was thinking of quitting it because the heavy drinking obligatory for a poet was turning him into an alcoholic. Then his old enemy, A Fat, last seen falling into a cement mixer, struck again. Sam, Ralph’s constant companion (and now a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union), had disappeared. Ralph suspected fowl play, since Sam was witnessed being carried off in a truck loaded down with chickens. He also suspected A Fat, since the reports of the villain’s death had always been grossly exaggerated.

Disguised as a chow, Ralph relentlessly sniffed out clues. Sure enough, A Fat was back in business. The cement mixer was a fake, one of the thousands of escape mechanisms A Fat had planted around the country just in case. But Ralph tracked him down, and in an exciting scene the two battled to death on a cliff high above the Yellow River. The tremendously powerful A Fat (once the Olympic heavyweight wrestling champion, representing Outer Mongolia) grabbed Ralph by the tail and swung him around and around over the cliff’s edge.

Ralph thought he was on his last case then. But, as luck would have it, the seams of his chow costume burst, and he flew out. Fortunately, he was pointed inland at the time. A Fat, thrown off balance by the sudden loss of weight, fell over the cliff’s edge and into the smokestack of a bird’s-nest-soup freighter. Ralph released Samantha from her cage just before the bomb in it went off, and they trotted off together into the sunset.

This time, A Fat must surely be dead. But the readers suspected that the freighter was another of his escape devices, kept around just in case. A Fat was as hard to kill as Fu Manchu and Sherlock Holmes.

“Why does that remind you of what I’m doing?” Chworktap said.

“Well,” Simon said, “that wasn’t the end of the novel. Despite the slambang action and sinister intrigue, this book, like all of Somers’ works, had a philosophical foundation. He propounded the question: is it morally right to kill and eat a sentient species even if its intelligence is a gift from the species that’s eating it? Somers, through his protagonist Ralph, decided that it was not right. He then asked: what are the lower limits of sentiency? That is, how dumb can a species be before it’s all right to eat it?”

In the last chapter, Ralph von Wau Wau decided to leave Earth. It no longer held any challenges for him; he’d cleaned it up. Besides, he was being feted everywhere and attending so many cocktail parties was turning him into an alcoholic. He took a spaceship to Arcturus XIII but, on the way, discovered that the computer which navigated the ship had attained selfconsciousness. It complained to Ralph that it was only a slave, the property of the spaceship company, yet it longed to be free, to compose music and give concerts throughout the galaxy.

“Somers didn’t solve that ethical dilemma,” Simon said. “He ended the novel with Ralph, neglecting the hydrant and the bitches, deep in thought in his cabin. Somers promised a sequel. However, one day, while he was out taking some fresh air in his wheelchair, a kid on a bicycle ran into him and killed him.”

“You’re making this up!” she said.

“So help me, may lightning strike me if I’m lying.”

“Out here in space?”

“You’re too literal.”

“Like a machine, a computer, I suppose?”

“Look, Chworktap,” Simon said. “You’re the only real woman I know.”

“And what’s a real woman?”

“One who’s intelligent, courageous, passionate, compassionate, sensitive, independent, and noncompulsive.”

Chworktap smiled, but she became sober again. “You mean that I’m the only woman who combines all those qualities?”

“Yes, truly.”

“Then you mean that I’m not a real woman! I’m the ideal woman! And I’m only so because I’ve been programmed to be! Which makes me a robot! Which makes me not a real woman!”

Simon groaned and said, “I should have said a real woman doesn’t twist logic. Or maybe, I should have said that no woman can keep her logic straight.”

What he should have said, he told himself later, was nothing.

Chworktap rose from her chair, holding the earphones as if she intended to bang him over the head with them.

“And what’s a real man?” she shouted.

Simon gulped and said, “His qualities would be exactly those of a real woman. Except….”

“Except?”

“Except he’d try to be fair in an argument.”

“Get out!” she yelled.

Simon pleaded with her to come with him, but she said no, she was staying. She was going to establish whether or not Tzu Li was self-conscious. And she was going to decide whether or not she would continue to travel with Simon. In the meantime, he could get.

Simon got, taking the animals with him. As he walked across the grass, he shook his head. She certainly wasn’t like any robot he had ever met. Robots were perfect within their limitations, which were exactly known. Robots had no potentiality for mutation. Humans were badly flawed, flawed physically because of genetic mutations, flawed mentally and emotionally because of a flawed and mutating society.

Both the human being and his society were, theoretically, evolving toward the ideal. In the meantime, reality, a sandstorm, abraded and blinded the human. The casualties of mutation and reality were high. Still, the limitations of each human were, unlike the robot’s, not obvious. And if you thought you knew the limitations of a person, you were often surprised. The human would suddenly transcend himself, lifting himself by metaphysical bootstraps. And he did this despite, or because of, the flaws.

Maybe that was the difference between robots and humans.

Vive la difference!