“Of course.”
“Sandburg understood him as no one else did.”
Charlie peered at me over the rim of his glass. “And you wonder why your Lincoln is a halfwit. Sandburg deals in metaphors. And symbolism. Harold, all that stuff is inaccurate at best. Exaggerated. Overplayed. Most of it is biased one way or another. You think the real Lincoln can be found in old copies of The New York Times? Or in poetry?”
“What kind of source would you suggest?”
“Something accurate. A precise record of a man’s character and abilities. Something that can be expressed mathematically. Something beyond any possibility of misinterpretation.”
“There is no such record,” I said. “It’s not possible that there could be.”
Charlie smiled. “Not for Lincoln. Or Bryan. But how about a physicist? Or a mathematician? Somebody who works with numbers?”
“Einstein?”
“Why not?”
“I’d have to learn the physics. You ever try to figure out what this quantum mechanics is about?”
“Not really.” He finished his drink and looked toward the door. It was getting late. “There must be something else that blends precision with the psyche.”
“Damned if I can think of anything.”
The check arrived. We split it down the middle, dropped tips on the table, and got up. “Chess,” he said. “You play chess, don’t you?”
And that’s how it happened that, on a cold, snowswept evening a few weeks later, I held a conversation with Paul Morphy. Now if you know anything about old chessplayers, you’ll wonder why I chose Morphy, who’s best known for two things: he was easily the strongest player of his time (and those who know about such matters maintain that no better natural player ever lived), and he swore off the game at twenty-one. Bitter that the reigning champion, Britain’s Howard Staunton, successfully, and cravenly, avoided a title match, Paul retired to his native New Orleans in 1859, eventually to lead the existence of a recluse.
I was of course worried about the Morphy persona. Even if I got him right, I might have to worry about emotional problems. On the other hand, a casual glance at the other chess immortals suggests that a man who simply dropped from public view and who committed no documented irrationalities worse than refusing to discuss the game looked downright ordinary.
I instructed Paul’s persona that it was located at the scene of some of his most dazzling victories: the Café de la Regénce in Paris, during the early autumn of 1858. Morphy was at the time in the midst of a triumphant European tour, undertaken in pursuit of the elusive Staunton.
Bringing a persona on-line is a sobering event. I was resuscitating a citizen of another age. Eventually, it might become possible to argue military strategy with Charles XII, discuss life and death with Socrates, and talk theology with St. Augustine.
The potential benefits from reconstructing perfect computer simulations of historical personages was enormous, and I knew it could be done. But I wondered whether Charlie might be right, whether the reality of, say, Plato’s psyche was too deeply buried beneath the rubble of history to be recoverable.
But Bryan, I knew, would not have given up. So I put together a new Paul Morphy. It took awhile, but eventually I had him. He expressed Morphy’s opinions, described his difficult life, and asked whether he could join the Masters’ Club.
That’s the way it started. I was able to listen to the low hum of power as we talked about music, about Parisian cafés, and about French women. He was bred, I noticed, with moderately puritanical inclinations. He loved Verdi and the theater, and he remarked that first evening that he wanted to attend Racine’s Brittanicus during the weekend, if I could arrange it.
How real it all seemed! I feel now as if I actually sat among the flickering candles and the polished tabletops of the Regénce. Paul related conversations with Henry Bird and Adolf Anderssen, and admitted to being puzzled by Paul Cezanne’s early work. Don’t misunderstand: I never forgot what he—it—was. But the illusion was unsettling.
During the days that followed, he described baroque theaters, strolls along cobblestone streets, and garrulous patrons of art galleries. And, I thought, by now those theaters had been demolished, the streets replaced by boulevards, and the patrons sent to a happier world.
For the first time during the years I’d worked on the project, I acquired a genuine sense of looking into another century.
Beyond the philosophical considerations, I saw a chance to pick up some cash, and do a public relations coup while I was at it. “Paul,” I asked, “how would you like to play in the U.S. Open?”
“What’s that?” he asked. “Will Staunton be there?”
I hesitated. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“Pity.”
“There’s a lot of money to be made. I suspect it would be easy for you.”
I became conscious of the steady hum of power which began intensifying in the mainframe. “No,” he said.
“I’d be happy to take care of the details.” I was beginning to realize that in the course of analyzing Morphy’s chess I hadn’t paid enough attention to his character.
“Playing for money is crass,” he said.
“But you’ve done it all your life. You’ve competed for stakes and cash prizes.”
“Only during the last two years.” He sounded vaguely annoyed. “And only when it was necessary to get the match I wanted. Even then I usually found a way to return the money. No, only the depraved or the desperate play chess for profit.”
So Paul, at least in his own mind, saved me from depravity. But he was still untested, which meant that I had to pay someone to come in. I settled on Emma Monroe, the Pennsylvania state champion, for a six-game weekend match. “Who?” asked Paul. “Where’s Staunton? Give me Staunton, and then I’ll be happy to take on these amateurs.”
“Do it for me,” I said. “Meanwhile, I’ll see if I can arrange something.”
The game board was tied directly into the computer so Paul could move his pieces and track his opponent’s responses.
Emma had White for game one. She opened with the English, and got to about the eighth move before Paul blew it apart. She staggered along for a while, drinking coffee furiously and alternately glaring at me and the computer. Then she resigned.
Things continued downhill for her. During the second game, which was played that evening, Paul opened files and diagonals effortlessly and crushed her with careless ease. The stunned champion took her losses with grace, but anger blazed in her eyes. “Where’d he come from?” On Saturday she didn’t show up.
Paul grew moody. For long periods of time he sat coiled within the mainframe, refusing to speak. Sometimes, at night, I woke to Tchaikovsky and Saint-Saens. He began playing the Danse Macabre over and over.
One morning, approximately a week after Emma walked out on us, he locked me out of the system and seized the mainframe for about two hours. There was nothing I could do except pace the workroom demanding that he stop the nonsense.
Finally, without a word, he returned control to me. But I knew he’d had access to everything in the memory banks. Including Lincoln. Including the fact that he was a construct. That it was more than a hundred years later than he thought it was.
“Why did you do that?” I asked. “The others never tried to take over the unit.”
“I suspect,” Paul said, “that they were satisfied with your misrepresentations.” The voice was strained. Had it belonged to a human being, I would have thought I detected fear.
“And you’re not?”