by Dan Simmons
But he did, finally, talk himself into goin’ back down. And he’d continued goin’ down until the company its own self made him retire early at age fifty-nine just because his lungs were filling up with coal dust. Well, hell, he explained to Donnie Ackley as they passed the bottle back and forth, everybody who worked down there had lungs clogged black like one of them old Hoover vacuum bags that hadn’t been changed in years, everyone knew that.
Donnie disagreed. Donnie thought that dying underground in a cave-in or gas explosion wasn’t nearly the worst way to go. Donnie started listing terrible ways he’d seen and been around. The time when that biker, Jack Coe, the one him and the others called the Hog, had been working for the highway department and had rolled backward off his mower on an incline and gone under the blades. Jack Coe’d lived on in the hospital for another three months until pneumonia’d got him, but Donnie didn’t hardly call it living what with the paralysis and the drooling and all the tubes carrying stuff into him and carrying stuff out.
Then there’d been Donnie’s first girlfriend, Farah, who’d gone down into niggertown to a bar and gotten gang-raped by a bunch of black bucks who ended up using things other than their dicks on her—their fists and broom handles and Coke bottles and even the sharp end of a tire iron, according to Farah’s sister—and …
“Don’t tell me she dieda gettin’ raped,” said Meredith Soloman, leaning across the aisle and taking the bottle back. His voice was soft and slurry, but Bremen could hear him as if in an echo chamber … first the slow, drunken structuring of the words in Meredith’s mind, then the slow, drunken words themselves. “Hell no, she didn’t die of getting raped,” said Donnie, and laughed at the idea. “Farah killed herself with Jack Coe’s sawed-off shotgun a couple of months later … she was living with the Hog then … and that’s what made Jack go and get a job with the highway people. Neither one of them never had no luck.”
“Well, a shotgun ain’t a bad way to go,” whispered Meredith Soloman, wiping the mouth of the bottle, drinking, and then wiping his own mouth as some of the moonshine dribbled out onto his sharp chin. “The tire iron an’ stuff don’t count ’cause none of that ain’t what killed her. And none of the shit you’re talkin’ about’s near as bad as layin’ there in the dark a mile underground with your air runnin’ out. It’s like bein’ buried alive an’ lastin’ for days.”
Donnie started to protest but Donna whimpered and tugged at his arm. “Donnie, hon, these pains’re coming real close now.”
Donnie handed her the bottle, pulled it back after she had taken a long drink, and leaned across the aisle to get back to his conversation. Bremen noticed that the pains were only a minute or so apart now.
Meredith Soloman, it turned out, was on a quest not terribly dissimilar from Donnie and Donna’s. The old man was trying to find a decent place in the country to die: someplace where the authorities would give his old bones a decent burial at county expense. He’d tried going home, back to West Virginia, but most of his kin were dead or moved away or didn’t want to see him. His children—all eleven if you counted the two illegitimate ones by little Bonnie Maybone—fell into the last category. So Meredith Soloman had been on a quest to find some hospitable state and county where an old boy with his lungs clogged as thick as two Glad bags full of black dust could spend a few weeks or months duty free in a hospital somewhere and … when the time came … have his bones treated with the respect due to bones belonging to a white Christian man.
Donnie began an argument about what happens to the soul once you die … he had specific views on reincarnation that he’d got from Donna’s cousin with the credit card … and the two men’s urgent whispers turned into urgent shouts as Meredith explained that heaven was heaven, no niggers or animals or insects allowed.
Four rows in front of the arguing drunks, a quiet man named Kushwat Singh sat reading a paperback by the light of the small reading light above him. Singh was not concentrating on the words in the book; he was thinking about the slaughter at the Golden Temple a few years before—the rampage of Indian government troops that had killed Singh’s wife, twenty-three-year-old son, and his three best friends. The officials had said that the radical Sikhs had been planning to overthrow the government. The officials had been right. Now Kushwat Singh’s mind, tired from twenty hours of traveling and sleepless nights before that, ran over the list of things he was going to buy at that certain warehouse near the Houston airport: Semtex plastic explosive, fragmentation grenades, Japanese electronic timing devices, and … with a little luck … several Stinger-type, shoulder-launched ground-to-air missiles. Enough matériel to level a police station, to cut down a gaggle of politicians like a sharp blade scything wheat … enough killing technology to bring down a fully loaded 747 …
Bremen stuffed his fists tight against his ears, but the babble continued and grew louder as the mercury vapor lamps switched on along the darkening interstate exchanges. Donna went into labor in earnest just as they crossed the Texas line and Bremen’s last glimpse of the couple was in the Beaumont bus station just after midnight, Donna curled up on a bench in great pain as the contractions racked her, Donnie standing with boots planted wide apart, weaving, the empty bottle of Meredith’s moonshine still in his right fist. Bremen actually looked into Donnie’s mind then, extending his telepathic probe through the surrounding neurobabble, but pulled it back quickly. Except for the drunken fragments of the earlier argument with Meredith still rattling around in there, there was nothing in Donnie Ackley’s mind. No plan. No suggestion of what to do with his wife and the infant trying to be born. Nothing.
Bremen actually sensed the panic and pain of the baby itself as it … she … approached her final struggle to be born. The infant’s consciousness burned through the gray shiftings of the bus station neurobabble like a searchlight through a thin fog.
Bremen stayed aboard the bus again, too exhausted to flee the cauldron of images and emotions boiling around him. At least Burk and Alice Jean, the horny marine just out of the brig and the equally horny WAF, had disembarked to find a room somewhere near the bus station. Bremen wished them well.
Meredith Soloman was snoring, his gums gleaming in the reflection from sodium vapor lamps as they pulled out of Beaumont at midnight. The old man was dreaming of the mines, of men shouting in the cold damp air, and of a clean, white, painless death. Donna’s birthing pains receded in Bremen’s mind as they left the downtown and climbed onto the interstate access ramp. Kushwat Singh touched his money belt where the hundred and thirty thousand dollars in Sikh cash waited to be converted into vengeance.
The seat next to Bremen’s was empty. He pulled the armrest back and curled up in a fetal position, drawing his legs up onto the seats and hugging his fists against his temples. At that second he wished that he had his brother-in-law’s .38 back; he wished that Vanni Facci had succeeded in delivering him to Sal and Bert and Ernie.
Bremen wished—with no melodrama, with no shred of self-consciousness or regret—that he was dead. The silence. The peacefulness. The perfect stillness.
But, for now, trapped in his living body and tortured mind, the roar and onslaught of mindrape continued, even as the bus moved southwest on causeways above swampland and pine forest, tires hissing on wet pavement now as the late-night rains came down in earnest. Bremen felt himself slowly being released to sleep now that the others slept, the small universe of sleeping humanity within the bus falling with him in the night, their muted dreams flickering like snippets of old film projected on an unwatched wall, the entire sealed cabin of them tumbling like the shattered Challenger shuttle in midnight free-fall together toward Houston and Denver and the deeper regions of darkness that Bremen knew that he was, for some reason he could not fathom, condemned to live to see.
EYES
Of all the new concepts that Jeremy has brought to me, the two most intriguing are love and mathematics.
These two sets would seem to have few common elements, but, in truth, the comparisons
and similarities are powerful to someone who has experienced neither. Both pure mathematics and pure love are completely observer dependent—one might say observer generated—and although I see in Jeremy’s memory the assertion by a few mathematicians like Kurt Gödel that mathematical entities exist independently of the human mind, rather like stars that would persist in shining even if there are no astronomers to study them—I choose to reject Gödel’s Platonism in favor of Jeremy’s stance of formalism: i.e., numbers and their mathematical relationships are merely a set of human-generated abstracts and the rules with which to manipulate these symbols. Love seems to me to be a similar set of abstracts and relation-of-abstracts, despite their frequent relationship with things in the real world. (2 apples + 2 apples did indeed = 4 apples, but the apples are not needed for the equation to be true. Similarly, the complex set of equations governing the flow of love do not seem dependent upon either the giver or recipient of that love. In a real sense I have rejected the Platonic idea of love, in its original sense, in favor of a formalist approach to the topic.)
Numbers are an astonishing revelation to me. In my former existence, prior to Jeremy, I understand the concept of thing but never dream that a thing—or several things—have the ghost echo of numerical values sewn to them like Peter Pan’s shadow. If I am allowed three glasses of apple juice at lunch, for instance, for me there is only juice … juice … juice, and no hint of quantification. My mind no more counts the juices than my stomach would. Similarly, the shadow of love, so attached to a physical object yet simultaneously so separate, never occurs to me. I find that property connected to only one thing in my universe—my teddy bear—and my reaction to that one thing has been in the form of pleasure/pain response with the bias toward the pleasurable, so that I “miss” teddy when he is lost. The concept of “love” simply never enters the equation.
Jeremy’s worlds of mathematics and love, so often overlapped before he comes to me, strike me like powerful lightning bolts, illuminating new reaches to my world.
From simple one-to-one correspondence and counting, to basic equations such as 2 + 2 = 4, to the equally basic (for Jeremy) Schrodinger wave equation that had been the starting point for his evaluation of Goldmann’s neurological studies:
All is revealed to me simultaneously. Mathematics descends upon me like a thunderclap, like the Voice of God in the biblical story of Saul of Tarsus being knocked off his horse. More importantly, perhaps, is that I can use what Jeremy knows to learn things that Jeremy does not consciously know. Thus, Jeremy’s basic knowledge of the logical calculus of neural nets, almost too elementary for him to remember, allows me to understand the way that neurons can “learn”:
Not my neurons, perhaps, given Jeremy’s rather frightening understanding of holographic learning functions in the human mind, but the neurons of … let’s say … a laboratory rat: some simple form of life that responds almost exclusively to pleasure and pain, reward and punishment.
Me. Or at least me, pre-Jeremy.
Gail does not care about mathematics. No, that is not quite accurate, I realize now, because Gail cares immeasurably about Jeremy, and much of Jeremy’s life and personality and deepest musings are about mathematics. Gail loves that aspect of Jeremy’s love of mathematics, but the realm of numbers itself holds no innate appeal for her. Gail’s perception of the universe is best expressed through language and music, through dance and photography, and through her thoughtful and often forgiving appraisal of other human beings.
Jeremy’s appraisal of other people—when he takes time to appraise them at all—is frequently less forgiving and often downright dismissive. Other people’s thoughts, on the whole, bore him … not out of innate arrogance or self-interest, but due to the simple fact that most people think about boring things. Back when his mindshield—his and Gail’s combined mindshields—could separate him from the random neurobabble around them, he did so. It was no more a value judgment on his part than if another person in deep and fruitful concentration had risen to close a window to shut out distracting street sounds.
Gail once shared her analysis of Jeremy’s distance from the common herd of thoughts. He is working up in his study on a summer evening; Gail is reading a biography of Bobby Kennedy down on the couch by the front window. The thick evening light comes through the white cotton curtains and paints rich stripes on the couch and hardwood floor.
Jerry, here’s something I want you to see.
? ? ? Mild irritation at being removed from the flow of the equation he is scrawling on the chalkboard. He pauses.
Bobby Kennedy’s friend Robert McNamara said that Kennedy thought the world was divided into three groups of people—
The world’s divided into two groups of people, Jeremy interrupts. Those who think the world’s divided into groups, and those who are smart enough to know better.
Shut up, a minute. Images of the pages fluttering and Gail’s left hand as she searches for her place again. The breeze through the screen smells of newly mown grass. The thick light deepens the flesh tones of her fingers and gleams on her simple gold band. Here it is … no, don’t read it! She closes the book.
Jeremy reads the sentences in her memory as she begins to structure her thoughts into words.
Jerry, stop it! She concentrates fiercely on the memory of rootcanal work she’d suffered the summer before.
Jeremy retreats a bit, allows the slight fuzziness of perception that passes for a mindshield between them, and waits for her to finish framing her message.
McNamara used to go to those evening “seminars” at Hickory Hill … you know, Bobby’s home? Bobby runs them. They were sort of like informal discussion sessions … bull sessions … only Kennedy would have some of the best people in whatever field there when they talked about things.
Jeremy glances back at his equation, holding the next transform in his mind.
This won’t take long, Jerry. Anyway, Robert McNamara said that Bobby used to sort of separate people into three groups.…
Jeremy winces. There are two groups, kiddo. Those who—
Shut up, wise guy. Where was I? Oh, Yes, McNamara said that the three groups were people who talked mostly about things, people who talked mostly about people, and people who talked mostly about ideas.
Jeremy nods and sends the image of a hippo yawning broadly.
That’s deep, kiddo, deep. What about those people who talk about people talking about things? Is that a special subset, or can we create a whole new—
Shut up. The point is that McNamara said that Bobby Kennedy didn’t have any time for people in the first two groups. He was only interested in people who talked about … and thought about … ideas. Important ideas.
Pause. So?
So that’s you, silly.
Jeremy chalks the transform in before he forgets the equation that follows it. That’s not true.
Yes, it is. You—
Spend most of my waking hours teaching students who haven’t had an idea in their heads since infancy. QED.
No … Gail opens the book again and taps long fingers against the page. You teach them. You move them into the world of ideas.
I can barely move them into the hall at the end of the class period.
Jerry, you know what I mean. Your removal from things … from people … it’s more than shyness. It’s more than your work. It’s just that people who spend most of their thinking time on anything lower than Cantor’s Incompleteness Theorem is boring to you … irrelevant … you want things to be cosmological and epistemological and tautological, not the clay of the everyday.
Jeremy sends, Gödel.
What?
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. It’s Cantor’s Continuum Problem. He chalks some transfinite cardinals onto his blackboard, frowns at what they have done to his wave equation, erases them, and scrawls the cardinals onto a mental blackboard instead. He begins framing a description of Gödel’s defense of Cantor’s Continuum Problem.
No, no, interru
pts Gail, the point is only that you’re sort of like Bobby Kennedy that way … impatient … expecting everyone to be interested in the abstract things that you are …
Jeremy is growing impatient. The transforms he holds in his mind are slipping slightly. Words do that to clear thinking. The Japanese at Hiroshima didn’y think that ? = mc2 was particularly abstract.
Gail sighs. I give up. You’re not like Bobby Kennedy. You’re just an insufferable, arrogant, eternally distracted snob.
Jeremy nods and fills in the transform. He goes on to the next equation, seeing precisely now how the probability wave will collapse into something looking very much like a classical eigenvalue. Yeah, he sends, already fading, but I’m a nice insufferable, arrogant, eternally distracted snob.