Murmur Page 10
If this is intelligence at the higher level these days, Alec, I am not impressed. I said nothing about your patriotic qualities because I did not want to seem to be mounting a defense.
The young man then said, “We have a job to do, Mrs. Wilson. Please answer these questions,” and I asked him who he was. He said that they both worked for MI6, and I inquired how, given the nature of his concerns and the Burgess affair, he could be so sure?
He wanted me to decrypt our conversation about the glass. He felt it might be a keyword for something and I said, no, it was a riddle as all things in dreams are riddles, and that he didn’t seem to understand what he was asking. Deciphering a message makes it intelligible; it doesn’t tell you what it means.
Well, I saw no reason not to tell him what a competent analyst of the forms and shapes would have gleaned from our call—that in this instance the oval scrying glass was clearly a concave mirror; that your brother John appeared as a dwarf because he stood beyond the center of curvature, in the back of the room, and that I had a self-image superimposed on me because I was at the center of curvature, and so on.
As to what that means, well, I don’t know and neither do you. That’s why we were talking and laughing about it.
And he said, “I think you do know what it means, Mrs. Wilson, or will do, and when you do, we’d like to hear from you.” It sent shivers down my spine, I must say. Then he asked me about the lady sitting all alone, and I’m afraid once again I was at a loss. In fact, I was upset, because it needs no great feat of interpretation to sense the powerful emotion in your hallucinations, and in that respect I feel for us both. We have both lost someone, haven’t we?
Bill later filled in the blanks of the lone lady. You were remembering an old English riddle, the sort of thing Dilly went in for. “I saw a lady sitting all alone.” That’s all there is of it and it remains unsolved. Except that Bill has suggested a solution. He says it is quite obvious once you see it. The answer is “Mirror”—the one who watches and reflects.
Really the most unthinkable part of what you told me was the business of imagining me hatless at your mother’s. As if I’d have dared. I seem to remember she and I were both very civil. Her pride in you was a bit of a force field, of course. The most striking thing was that she couldn’t find anything to ask me. When we were in the garden, she pointed at the flowers in turn and gave me their Latin names. And when she’d done that, she blurted out in a sort of panic: “As a little boy, Alec made his own pens.” Anyway, I think your somewhat distrait image of me must be an homage to self—I am partly you in dreams and so more likely to forget a hat.
But we must meet: this keeping up of merely affable appearances is hard, when there is so much at stake for you. Max and Lyn bring news, of course, but it isn’t the same. I miss you.
We could meet in King’s—in Gibbs’?
What has your Dr. Stallbrook made of the cartoons? I expect he will say they point to some inability to countenance reality, etc., but I think there is more to it than that. Snow White is a detailed work of art, and the thing about that kind of creation must be that it is only ever painstakingly achieved, and yet always a surprise, which is the essence of cryptanalysis, after all, and of the work we did. I think it is also clearly the lesson of caring about anyone.
Better not call again: I do not like the idea of being “cut off.” And be of good cheer: the anxiety of your pursuers will abate. They will find others of more concern to them. For now, though, honi soit and let your virtue continue to shine.
Love,
June
PS So good to hear your voice. You sounded physically whole—revived? Resigned? Phones very good for scrying. I can picture you, however far away!
As soon as one can see the cause and effect working themselves out in the brain, one regards it as not being thinking, but a sort of unimaginative donkey-work. From this point of view one might be tempted to define thinking as consisting of ‘those mental processes that we don’t understand’. If this is right then to make a thinking machine is to make one which does interesting things without our really understanding quite how it is done.
—A. M. Turing, “Can Automatic Calculating Machines Be Said to Think?” (1952)
The People in the Lake
Dear June,
Well, we shall avoid the telephone and trust to the post, although I am not convinced that it makes much difference. My letters are certainly being read: the postbox is just over the way and I can see the man rummaging about in the bag that he takes away with him. You were kind to tax the intelligence officers with the illogic of their suspicions, in defense of my honor, but you were being too subtle. I am now a nuisance. Having been identified as one kind of sexual menace, I am as liable to be another political sort, I suppose.
This prompts a response to your interesting remarks about mirrors. The lady who isn’t there in the glass, who’s all alone, is possibly a feverish example of one’s thoughts about being original in some crucial respect. One has one’s moments, after all.
It strikes me that a mirror reflects, but that, geometrically speaking, it transforms rather than translates. One is turned back on oneself and in the process one sees a second person, a new person whom one does not fully recognize. Always uncanny, this about-facing, and not unrelated to the common fear of automation, which people assume to be a sort of coming doom. The fear of robots, I take it, is like the fear of prophecy, the essence of which is repetition: if you can be repeated, you can be replaced.
But the funny thing about a reflection is that it isn’t actually a repetition at all. I remember goggling at myself in the Haunted Mirror Maze two years ago, in Battersea, and wondering about this. The person I saw was clearly capable of being another person—inaccessible to me. And isn’t that why the Queen in Snow White is so angry? Her slave in the mirror is really someone else. An apparently obedient but deceptive likeness. And, for that matter, isn’t Snow White herself another betrayer of the Queen’s beauty, another likeness come to life, with her own puffy-sleeved and faintly irritating style? (You made this point rather less mechanically when you talked about cartoons being a surprise.)
Now, I’m no beauty—please, don’t insist—but I present our anxious government with a similar dilemma. I am a piece of sensitive information. I am, in fact, the personification of such information. I hold secrets. I know how impulses passing through mercury tubes can store memory. I have the key. I am the gatekeeper at a technological frontier. The difficulty is that there are only two things you can do with a piece of sensitive information, as we discovered at Bletchley, June. You can disguise it, or you can delete it.
The problem with disguising or encrypting it is that the original still exists. One has doubled the information, not made it less sensitive. Something has happened to it, but the semantic load persists behind a mask, a veil, a foreign accent, new papers, breasts, etc., and really the only thing to do about that, if you’re still anxious, is to remove both bits of information—the original and the encryption—altogether.
Why are the intelligence services paranoid? Because they know you can’t force someone to conform, or learn the error of their ways. You can’t reach the inner life. I can’t be a model citizen—though, heaven knows, I’ve tried—because the menace lingers inside. You can’t simply change people, in other words, or double them, because you can’t know they’ve changed. Only they can know that. Only they know what it’s like to be copied.
I bathe slowly because it hurts. My skin is sore, but I’m consoled by the stinging of the water and the sheer awkwardness of feeling my shape so altered, the eczema under the flaps, the bruised diminution of my maleness, my fatty hips. I look at what has happened in the mirror and do not in any way recognize what I see, while at the same time feeling, deep down, that I am more myself than ever. A person who feels pain. When I go to the Infirmary, I am being given instructions. When I eat, I am instructing my stomach acids to get to work. Everything acts on me to gain a programmed respons
e, and sometimes I cannot imagine a way to retrieve what self-determination I once had except, perhaps, by the admittedly extreme measure of introducing a halting mechanism.
But the more I become an instrument, the more I am treated like a thing, the more convinced I am of my real existence, and of its uniqueness, which is what binds me to you and you to me. I would go so far as to say that we are commonly alone. This is a version of Schrödinger’s theory about consciousness. We each have our view of the same mountain. I wonder if it mayn’t be the case that consciousness is a contradiction: universal by dint of being irreducibly one aspect, one mind, at a time.
I am in the mood to dwell on this a little longer, in part because I have been so misunderstood on this subject (as you will know, if you listened to that broadcast with Max and Julius).
If I say that sufficiently human-like behavior is enough to suggest the presence of intelligence, that does not mean that I think the mind trivial or unmysterious. On the contrary, I think it is inevitable. The mind is a) the inevitable result of certain physical processes, each with a unique history of formation, the outcomes of which are—like certain mathematical truths—logically undecidable in advance, and therefore b) wholly mysterious. Somehow it is the case that the mind arises from a biology and a physics to which it may not return. That is what I mean when I say that we won’t know what machines are thinking once they start to think. We won’t know because once consciousness has come about, it looks out of different eyes. It has particolored shades of meaning. It is like poor Vertumnus, in the Metamorphoses, who shape-shifts like mad but has only one ambition, which is to love Pomona. Or even, a little, like my own idea, the Universal Machine, which is different machines fielding one mutable property. The point to grasp in this analogy is that the different machines, in the same box, are different. So I don’t think consciousness is ever really copied. Because copies aren’t copies.
Copernicus tells us that our corner of the universe is typical of the whole, and from that we infer that, in an infinite cosmos, however rare the conditions may be that lead to life and consciousness, they must occur an infinite number of times. If the beings that arise from these conditions then exist in finite states (are embodied) for a finite period of time, it follows that they must exist in those finite states infinitely often. We conclude that there must be an infinite number of replicated beings, all of whom are identical: a universe of doppelgängers.
But if people are replicated, and one of the features of any person being replicated is a relation to consciousness that is unique, how are these replicated beings the same?
I see no easy solution to this conundrum, where reproducible computing intelligence is concerned, unless we accept that thinking machines will only ever be merely efficient, and therefore unconscious, which I do not accept. And even then, I do not think the unconscious machines are quite copies, because they must be enumerable, and the order in which they are enumerated makes a difference. Furthermore, I begin to suspect that we cannot rely on the seeming efficiency of a body, or an assembly of valves and switches, to be as brutish as it appears to be. Because among duplicates with variations, each has a powerful claim on originality, though it may not be strictly aware of the fact.
This is the essence of the story of Pinocchio, I take it, who is a puppet and a person at the same time. Or, better: he is a puppet who does not know that he is already a person.
I am much more interested in machines that do not quite realize they are already persons than I am in all that Amazing Tales nonsense about machines faking human life and taking over the world. Why, for heaven’s sake, would they bother?
Which brings me to another imperfectly preserved nocturne, dear June. It is difficult to say what it describes: Christopher, again, and the isolation I observe but do not feel. I am on an island, with Stallbrook and Matron, and then in a room, and then in a submarine chamber, fathoms and fathoms down. I’m separated from Chris at the beginning. He looks back at me—he knows something. He seems to be saying, “Now I see …”
He crops up again, twice, and—he’s different each time.
When I met the young man who brought about my fall from grace, I knew I was heading for trouble. He stole from me. I found £3 missing from my wallet and wrote to Cyril (the young man), trying to break things off, but it didn’t work. He appeared on my doorstep like some kind of revenant fresh from the mists of time, and was very indignant, said that he wasn’t a thief, how dare I suggest it, I had more to lose, he could make life very uncomfortable for me, &c. I am still trying to get it straight in my head. The way things worked out, the way I couldn’t get rid of him suggested some odd loss of volition. I couldn’t change anything about what was happening.
Perhaps the die was cast. Perhaps everything is determined. Whatever you do to avoid something is the thing that brings it about. Prophecy, again.
Except that this misses something, like the glass without an image. It is too final and neat. To know that you are a pawn of justice and the fates is simultaneously to be more than that. And then the realization that the game is up opens a door behind your back, and Nemesis comes through it and without turning around you can tell that he’s an echo of someone you’d almost but not quite forgotten, a dead ancestor in a very young face.
Pain is memory without witness or corroboration. It isn’t real to anyone else, and that is what allows torturers, including governments, to be torturers. They can pretend it isn’t happening because it isn’t happening to them.
You are right. The time has come to meet. Gibbs’ Building is a very good idea. I can meet you there at any point. I have only to be at the Infirmary every Wednesday for my weekly instruction. Just let me know.
Love,
Alec
*
Above Deauville a stratospheric haze has turned the sky into paper, the screen of an immense lantern. Beneath it, everything on earth blackens, poplars and landing stage, the vines and trellised plums, Matron, Stallbrook, their little rowing boat. Alone of all of us Christopher Molyneaux stays light—overexposed.
He steps into the boat, sits down, picks up the oars, and, weakening with every stroke, a chalk drawing, rows himself back across the lake. He’s quite naked beneath that foul blanket. Day strengthens and the sound of coming heat is in my ears. I am alive and unprepared. Words have condensed out of the early mist onto my tongue, but they are not the words I hear myself shouting—“But you are dead! So this must be a dream!”—and there is nothing I can do to save my friend, who drops his oar in confusion and in that moment almost seems recalled to life.
The blanket slips from his shoulders. He notices his arms whitening, the flesh become featureless smoke; perhaps, in the smooth water’s face, its pewter sky, he sees his own astonishment. The look coils round itself, a drapery study. He makes a last gesture, one desperate lunge for air, before an airborne shape, speeding toward us from the school, bears down upon the water, beats its wings, and tears the ghost of Christopher apart. His two halves roll away.
“Where has he gone? He didn’t want to go. He changed his mind! He—”
But the crow, the executioner, has passed judgment. His murderous friends jostle among the upper leaves. They are a dark council, glistening like eyes.
The Colonel presses gently on my arm and Matron steers me from the other side, as though I were an invalid. Maybe I am. The light condenses in the air and in the glass of the pavilion doors. I hear a bird cry like an animal in pain and there are flying skittles overhead—Canada geese, too small, too high—that don’t fly straight but shift and shimmer, loop and flash, caught in the sun’s rays like a shoal.
“He’s part of you now, anyway,” the Colonel says, “and part of me.”
“And me,” Matron agrees.
“He’s gone into the world around us, into every phase of matter—gas, liquid, crystal.” He stoops to take a pinch of sand between finger and thumb and rubs the grains, which must be very light. They seem to drift in a spotlit current. “The gre
at statistical mystery. And there is nothing you can name, and no one, he is not strangely equipped to be. The lake will see to that.”
I know I’m sleeping but I feel as if I haven’t slept. Perhaps it’s just the confusions of youth and middle age here on the shore, watching the poplars fill and sway, my toes trying to grip the grit. I’m at a point of division where I can’t tell the elements apart; the living and the dead are land and sea, the tessellations of a sphere.
Stallbrook and Matron walk me from the lakeside to the summerhouse, where I held Molyneaux last night. One pane of the French doors is sun. The others harbor darker images, three figures star-blinded, their features struck clear from the plate. We pause on the threshold. My guides have shed their institutional anger. They seem less obviously the stern authorities of Wargrave School, although I find their facelessness—they register beside me as mere shapes—distressing, too.
My suspicion is old. I swam here as a boy. Now I am changed. It is as if I watched myself cross over from the lake’s far side. Can that be so? Is this my living shape? I seem to see another version of myself in the dark glass, a glimpse of states I had, states that will come to be, an infinite progress of frames.
Into the summerhouse we pass and on the threshold, which, like all thresholds, exists only in light of what happens, the room in front of us deforms and rearranges its extent, as if to demonstrate a problem in topology. No more a sanctuary, its open aspect hardens into clinical austerity. Where there were once French doors and rugs, blankets, there’s now a bare table, a gurney in the far corner, its nondescript mattress panting with straps. The door behind me wears a small panel of wire-mesh glass like something glimpsed in the distance. It brings to mind detention, war, reports.