"How about getting paroled for good behavior?"
"Come on, Engineer. Come clean for once. Tell me all that doesn't depress the hell out of you."
"No, it doesn't. It just means we have as good a shot at this as any waffling poseur. We can get our supernet to sound exactly like a fashionable twenty-two-year-old North American whiz kid imitating a French theorist in translation by, say, this time next month."
"Engineer—"
"I'm serious, Marcel. I've seen the stuff you're talking about. Gnomic is in. We just have to push 'privilege' and 'reify' up to the middle of the verb frequency lists and retrain. The freer the associations on the front end, the more profound they're going to seem upon output."
"Fine. Do as you please. You obviously don't need me for any of it. And I don't need to spend a year working on a pointless and cynical scam. If I wanted that, I would have stayed in tech writing."
"Marcel, sit down. Marcel! Don't be an infant," Lentz ordered. His voice broke. It shocked me. I didn't think he'd care. Certainly not about something as trivial as my packing it in.
"All right," he stammered. "I didn't mean that. I'm sorry. I was joking. A little self-deflation. It's been so long since I've been satisfied with anything I've done that I get critical. And I forget that not everybody is as detached as I am. I thought you understood. I'm sorry."
I just watched the man. All footwork. All of it, the contrition as well as the cynicism. He himself had long ago lost the ability to tell what he was after or when he was being genuine. But the astonishing thing — the thing that made no sense — was that he wanted me around. The game was no fun, it was worthless to him otherwise. I couldn't figure it, and I didn't want to leave without knowing.
I sat back down, as deliberately as possible. I drew out my answer, curious to see what I would say.
"Imp B?" I asked. I wasn't sure what I meant by the question.
Lentz answered without pause. "A noble cause, in any case. And not without theoretical interest. Let's do it for ourselves. I mean, of course we'll show them what we come up with and all. But let's just work, and forget about the bet."
I looked at the man. The bank safety-glass lenses protected him from eye contact.
"To hell with that." I laughed. "My kid is going to ace that exam!"
"Okay, okay." Lentz cackled alongside me. "Anything you say." His eyes seemed to be watering. He actually put his hand on my shoulder, but just as quickly removed it.
We worked hard on sentence parsing, on relationships and comparisons, on simple semantic decoding. B did not get any more likable in the training process. But it grew undeniably clever at pattern matching and manipulation. The fact that it curve-fit countless serial streams of input vectors and could generalize the shape of a simple sentence at all punched my lights out.
May will be fine next year, I assured it. Father hopes to plant roses in the front yard. Mother goes to fetch the doctor.
We were in Lentz's office one weekend afternoon when he said, "It's time to give the kid something a little more obscure."
He rooted through the chaos of his bookshelves. From behind a stack of papers that had begun to recycle themselves, he pulled a fifties-era thermos bottle, a stained coffee mug inscribed Opa, and a ring of what for all the world looked like assorted roller-skate keys. Clearing this hole allowed him to shove around the rest of the junk in his packed office as if it were all some giant 15-puzzle.
This shoving at last released a book that seemed to have been stuck in deepest hiding. Squirreled away, like a boy's soft-core magazine. The pale pink fata morgana photograph on the jacket had been torn and taped clumsily back together. I knew the book even before he dredged it up into view.
"Oh no. Engineer. Lentz. Give me a break. Not that one. I've seen full professors make a total debacle of that book."
"Well, now, Marcel. We're not going to do the book. Heaven forfend. Just this bit."
He dropped the text open in front of me, a horny thumbnail over-scoring the harmless epigraph to Chapter One.
"Just that?"
"Just that."
"You're insane, you know."
"Oh yes. I'm quite aware of that. Wait," Lentz delayed me. "I want Plover to see this. Let's hope our prize pupil doesn't choose this moment to act up."
He limped down the corridor, making good time for a sixty-year-old whose body had been nothing but a nuisance to him for half those years. He returned with a dubious Harold in tow.
When he saw me, Harold's face lit up. "Ave, Scriptor! Are you keeping this charlatan honest?" Had I taken the least step toward him, he would have wrapped me in a bear hug.
Harold's spontaneous affection depressed me. I'd done nothing to get this fellow to like me, and the fact that he did made me feel dishonest. My sense of unearned credit was interrupted by the appearance in the doorway of a sullen teenage girl.
"Trish," Plover commanded. "Trish. Take the headphones off. Take — the — headphones. ." He pantomimed in affable, immense semaphore. Trish complied, rolling her eyes toward a spiritual mezzanine.
"This is the novelist whose books I showed you." Harold turned back toward me, to make sure I was the person he meant. "Richard, this is Trish. The second of the Plover Amazons."
She shook my hand, then looked around the lab for sterilization equipment.
"How many in the tribe?" I asked.
Harold started ticking off his fingers. "I don't know. I've lost count."
"Oh, Daddy!" Trish moaned. A mentally deficient father: the only thing that could have driven her to address me. "Don't listen to him. He's been insufferable ever since Mom let Sue go to Italy."
"Hear that? 'Insufferable.' Trish is the literary one. She writes poetry."
"I do not. They're song lyrics."
"She'd like you to look at them sometime."
"No way!" Trish shouted.
Lentz snorted at the collocation. "Is Hartrick going to come have a look at this?" he asked.
I felt the tension before the sentence was even half out of him. Harold looked ready to strangle the little man.
"No. Just do your stuff. Let's see what you got."
"What you have" Trish corrected. This time, Dad rolled his eyes.
I spoke to B. I launched into the singsong nursery rhyme that, for reasons that I've long since forgotten, I'd used to open my first novel.
"As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. ."
I stumbled and hung up on the lines. Harold reminded me how they went, and I got all the way through.
Everyone held their breath. "Well?" Lentz said. "Go ahead, then. Get on with it. Pop the question."
I posed the query with which my firstborn book began.
"Kits, cats, sacks, wives: how many were going to St. Ives?"
Somewhere on the curve of unfathomable syntaxes lay the desired answer. Our network of nets took less than half a minute to triangulate it. "One."
"Way cool!" Trish exclaimed. She moved toward the terminal, excited. I noticed something wrong with the way she walked. Then the shoe dropped: she was on roller blades.
Plover broke out in a belly laugh. "This is for real?"
Trish took the microphone. "Open the pod bay doors, HAL!" Vectors danced across the screen, but Imp B kept its counsel. Trish pouted.
"It may be less impressive than it looks," I demurred. "I assume it just ignored everything in the riddle that it couldn't fit into the main predication."
"It's impressive enough," Lentz said, laconically. "Unfailing literal-mindedness may be the most impressive thing going."