"William Tenn - The Ghost Standard" - читать интересную книгу автора (William Tenn)Juan Kydd stared at him. "L-i-m-o-u-s-i-n-o?" he said in disbelief, yet already susнpecting what the lobstermorph was up to. "I challenge you."
Again Tuezuzim waited a long time. Then, slowly rotating his crippled left chela at Juan Kydd's face, he said, "The word is limousinoid." "There's no such word! What in hell does it mean?" "What does it mean? 'Like a limousine, in the form of or resembling a limousine.' It can be used, probably has been used, in some piece of technical prose." "Referee!" Kydd yelled. "Let's have a ruling. Do you have limousinoid in your dicнtionary?" "Whether or not it's in the dictionary, Computer," Tuezuzim countered, "it has to be acceptable. If dirigibloid can exist, so can limousinoid. If limousinoid exists, Kydd's challenge is invalid and he gets the t of GhostЧand loses. If limousinoid doesn't exist, neither does dirigibloid, and so Kydd would have lost that earlier round and would therefore now be up to the t of Ghost. Either way, he has to lose." Now it was the Malcolm Movis that took its time. Five full minutes it considered. As it testified later, it need not have done so; its conclusion was reached in microsecнonds. "But," it noted in its testimony at the inquest, "an interesting principle was involved here that required the use of this unnecessary time. Justice, it is said, not only must be done, but must seem to be done. Only the appearance of lengthy, careнful consideration would make justice seem to be done in this case." Five minutesЧand then, at last, the Malcolm Movis gave its verdict. "There is no valid equation here between dirigibloid and limousinoid. Since diriнgible is a word derived from the so-called classic languages, it may add the Greek suffix -oid. Limousine, on the other hand, derives from French, a Romance language. It comes from Limousin, an old province of France. The suffix -oid cannot therefore be used properly with itЧRomance French and classical Greek may not be mixed." The Malcolm Movis paused now for three or four musical beats before going on. Juan Kydd and Tuezuzim stared at it, the human's mouth moving silently, the crustacean's antennae beginning to vibrate in frantic disagreement. "Tuezuzim has incurred t, the last letter of Ghost," the computer announced. "He has lost." "I protest!" Tuezuzim screamed. "Bias! Bias! If no limousinoid, then no dirigiblЧ" "Protest disallowed." And the blast of the Hametz Drive tore through the lobsterнmorph. "Your meals, Mr. Kydd," the computer said courteously. The inquest, on Karpis VIII of Sector N-42B5, was a swift affair. The backup tapes of the Malcolm Movis were examined; Juan Kydd was merely asked if he had anything to add (he did not). But the verdict surprised almost everyone, especially Kydd. He was ordered held for trial. The charge? Aggravated cannibalism in deep space. Of course, our present definition of interspecies cannibalism derives from this case: The act of cannibalism is not to be construed as limited to the eating of members of one's own species. In modern terms of widespread travel through deep space, it may be said to occur whenever one highly intelligent individual kills and consumes another highly intelligent individual. Intelligence has always been extremely difficult to define precisely, but it will be here and henceforth understood to involve the capacity to understand and play the terrestrial game of Ghost. It is not to be unнderstood as solely limited to this capacity, but if an individual, of whatever biologiнcal construction, possesses such capacity, the killing, consuming and assimilating of that individual shall be perceived as an act of cannibalism and is to be punished in terms of whatever statutes relate to cannibalism in that time and that place. ЧThe Galaxy v. Kidd, Karpis VIII, C17603 Now, Karpis VIII was pretty much a rough-and-ready frontier planet. It was still a rather wide-open place with a fairly tolerant attitude toward most violent crime. As a result, Juan Kydd was assessed a moderate fine, which he was able to pay after two months of working at his new job in computer programming. The Malcolm Movis computer did not fare nearly as well. Furthermore, and perhaps most damaging, the computer was held to have lied in a critical situationЧor, at least, to have withheld information by not telling the whole truth. When Tuezuzim had accused it of anti-lobstermorph bias, it had pointed to the fact that the Malcolm Movis omicron beta had been designed by a lobstermorph and that anti-lobstermorph bias was therefore highly unlikely. The whole truth, howнever, was that the designer, Dr. Hodgodya, was living in self-imposed exile at the time because he hated his entire species and, in fact, had expressed this hatred in numerнous satirical essays and one long narrative poem. In other words, anti-lobstermorph bias had been built in and the computer knew it. To this the computer protested that it was, after all, only a computer. As such, it had to answer questions as simply and directly as possible. It was the questioner's job to formulate and ask the right questions. "Not in this case," the court held. "The Malcolm Movis omicron beta was not funcнtioning as a simple question-and-answer machine but as a judge and umpire. Its obligations included total honesty and full information. The possibility of anti-lobstermorph bias had to be openly considered and admitted." The Malcolm Movis did not give up. "But you had two top-notch programmers in Kydd and Tuezuzim. Could it not be taken for granted that they would already know a good deal about the design history of a computer in such general use? Surely for such knowledgeable individuals not every i has to be dotted, not every t has to be crossed." "Software people!" the court responded. "What do they know about fancy hardнware?" The computer was eventually found guilty of being an accessory to the crime of cannibalism and was ordered to pay a fine. Though this was a much smaller fine than the one incurred by Juan Kydd, the Malcolm Movis, unlike Kydd, had no financial resources and no way of acquiring any. That made for a touchy situation. On a freewheeling planet such as Karpis VIII, judges and statutes might wink a bit at killers and even cannibals. But never at out-and-out deadbeats. The court ruled that if the computer could not pay its fine, it still could not evade appropriate punishment. "Let justice be done!" The court ordered that the Malcolm Movis omicron beta be wired in perpetuity into the checkout counter of a local supermarket. The computer requested that inнstead it be disassembled forthwith and its parts scattered. The request was denied. So. You decide. Was justice done? Afterword The essential plot gimmick here is the variations the characters play on "dirigible" and "limousine"Чand the results thereof. It is based on an actual game of Ghost in which Dan Keyes and my brother Mort were participants and used these variations against each other. I won't tell who did which. But an attempted definition of "humanness" is what precipitated the story. If you beнlieve, as I do, that we will shortly (ten years? fifty? a hundred and fifty?) be encountering alien intelligent life-forms and having to learn to live with them on various moral levels (are they to be considered the equivalent of dogs and cats and chimpanzees, or ants and bees, or sixteenth-century AmerindiansЧor are we to be considered the equivalent of one of these to them?), you must be thinking also of the necessary distinctions in many areas that we and they will have to make. So I wrote the story and my agent, Virginia Kidd, sent it to Playboy, and Alice K. Turner, the editor there, said she liked it a lot and would pay a lot for it, butЧjust as an earlier editor at the magazine had said about an earlier storyЧwould I please cut it down someнwhat, say, by at least a fourth? One-fourth, I said? One-full-damn-fourth? Impossible! I said. I reread the story alнmost spluttering. But, for the hell of it, I tried to do as she had asked. And much to my chagrin, it turned out to be not only possible, but actually fairly easy. Worse yet, the resulting piece now had much more focus. Alas. This sort of thing may keep a writer humble, but it should really not be allowed to go on. Written 1994 / Published 1994 |
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