At first, when he had believed that togetherness would eventually bring closeness, he had tried to communicate thoughts that to him seemed important. Now he knew better than to bother making even simple observations. His reality was one that the rest of the world evidently didn’t share. So on any level that mattered, he no longer tried communicating very much to anyone. And that was why he found the prospect relieving of not having to accommodate or be accommodated for a whole weekend, but, instead, of just enjoying being himself.
“I said, maybe this nostalgia for five-hundred-year-old music is an unhealthy sign,” Horace resumed when the hot-air drying cycle stopped and Corrigan stepped out. The strains of a vigorous string concerto were coming through the open doorway from the living room.
“Oh, is that a fact? And what led you to this momentous conclusion?” Corrigan inquired, reaching for a towel.
“The symptoms are on record from expert diagnosis. Item: Doctor Manning’s caution to Mr. Felmer in the series Fraternity, where Tim’s preoccupation with dated European architecture indicated a pathological condition of reality-rejection. Furthermore, as Fenwick Zellor observed in The Mind Healer, a morbid fixation on the past is, in effect, the same—”
Corrigan laughed as he turned to the mirror and began palming shaving lather onto his face. “Ah, come on, Horace. You don’t call that kind of stuff reality, now, do you? It’s a how-to manual for misfits. Attitude-programming for the intellectually bereft, artistically inane, and socially clueless. Wouldn’t you agree?”
By now, Corrigan was cheerfully resigned to the thought of being a permanent misfit. But he enjoyed goading Horace by implying that he alone represented normality, while the norms that the computer reflected were distortions. Horace had never been able to grasp the subtleties of what Corrigan saw as humor, and would miss the point entirely. Muriel had the same problem. Perhaps, Corrigan thought to himself, what the world needed was Irish computers. Perhaps he should have married an Irish wife.
Sure enough:
“If you ask me—”
“I didn’t.”
“Well, I did make it a conditional.” If Horace had feet, it would have stamped one. After years, it still couldn’t understand when Corrigan was having fun—or why. Corrigan grinned at himself in the mirror. Intelligent machines would finally have arrived—almost—when their adaptive neural nets could handle things like this, he decided. Horace went on: “I don’t think that those comments are appropriate, Joe. You seem to be forgetting that you’re the one with residual psychiatric readjustment problems.” (And demonstrate a dash more of the human art called “tact” while they were at it, Corrigan thought.) “But you’re suggesting that the rest of the world ought to change to conform to your perceptions. Hardly a rational position to adopt, I would have thought.” The machine stressed the implied conditional, giving a wonderful emulation of sarcasm. Corrigan was impressed.
“I can only go by the way things seem to me, Horace,” he said. “If you can’t call a pig a pig when you see one, what hope is there?”
“Please explain the connection with pigs.”
Corrigan sighed. (And better comprehension of metaphor, along with tact and humor.) “Some other time. What I meant was, there’s no point in pretending that something looks other than the way it does. I’m told that my powers of projective immersion are impaired. And maybe they are. But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody that I might actually be happy with things being this way.”
Corrigan finished drying his face and went back into the bedroom to select some clothes for the day. Horace’s voice pursued him relentlessly like an anxious butler.
“Are you really the one to be the judge of that, Joe?”
“The judge of what 1 like? Sure. Who better did you have in mind?” Maybe a regular, button-up, navy shirt and plain, old-fashioned, gray slacks, he thought—non-projectively, non-immersingly expressing what he thought of bright purple jumpsuits and plastic imitation combat garb.
“I meant, of whether it’s healthy to feel happy about it,” Horace said. “According to the testimony of Doctor Newcomb, who as you may recall was the expert witness called in the trial of Jenny Drew in the—”
“Horace,” Corrigan interrupted. “I thought you were talking about reality. Those are fictional characters in contrived situations. Get it? They don’t really exist.”