“The girl is your equal,” said Isaac. “In every significant respect. And now your technological advantage has been neutralized by —”
“The girl is nothing,” said Socrates, harshly. “She can’t stop me. She can’t touch me. She’ll try. But in the end she’ll watch me wipe everyone she cares about. Inform the City Solicitor that he shall have his prize within the hour.”
“What makes you so certain?” said Isaac.
“I’ve been doing this for millennia,” growled Socrates. “She’s new.”
“But you’ve never faced anyone like her,” fretted Isaac. “How do you know you’ll be able to —”
“Call it prophecy,” said Socrates. He broke into a run.
Isaac glanced down at his notebook, and goggled.
During his voicelink conversation he had absent-mindedly scribbled on his notepad. Or, to be slightly more accurate, bits of Isaac’s mind that used to be absent, back when he’d been taking the pills, had presentmindedly directed Isaac to scribble unconsciously on his notepad.
Beneath his half-finished theorem, after the words Find X, Isaac had scribbled a solution. It said this:
X = Brown.
And now that his brain was operating beyond the realms of mere logic and empirical analysis, Isaac knew — or possibly felt — with absolute, unshakeable confidence, that if any hypothetical, all-knowing, all-seeing, slightly pedantic beings had happened to take an interest in these notes, they’d have given “X = Brown” a gold star.
He stared down at the solution. He blinked. He cleared his throat and flipped a switch.
“Mobile 1,” he said, speaking into the voicelink.
“Command,” said Socrates.
“Priority orange override,” said Isaac.
“Confirming override protocol,” said Socrates.
“Redesignating target priority,” said Isaac, swallowing nervously. “Change primary mission objective. Primary target is now Brown.”
“Say again?” said Socrates. “Primary target is the girl, Tonto Choudhury. Mission objective is —”
“Ignore the girl,” said Isaac, as firmly as he could muster. “Primary target is now Brown. All other considerations secondary. Brown is the anomaly, Mobile 1. I say again. Brown is the anomaly. Neutralize and retrieve. Wipe other targets as required.”
And because suspense can lead to emotional distress, anxiety, nervous conditions, and a host of related and unpleasant physical symptoms, it might be useful to point out, at this juncture, just before things get really hairy, that Isaac was correct.
In almost every respect.
Chapter 36
The post-conference buffet had been laid out in Conron Hall — a traditional, ancient, multi-tiered, mahogany-walled gallery festooned with paintings of ex-chancellors, celebrated professors, and other luminaries of higher education. It featured a towering, vaulted ceiling criss-crossed by polished timbers. On any day but this one, the Hall would have been pregnant with the smell of ancient books, old oils, and older professors. Today it smelled of cabbage, as well as chipped beef, aged cheese, hearty stews, and musty robes that hadn’t been laundered since the faculty had discovered how to pocket the annual dry-cleaning allowance. The Hall’s traditional furnishings had been cleared out of the room in order to make way for the post-conference buffet. And because the ads for the banquet featured the magic words “All Faculty Welcome,” the professoriate was present in great profusion, representing some thirty different disciplines.
The professors were decked out in an assortment of cardigans, threadbare suits, academic robes, pantsuits, and thrown-together thrift-storish creations that advertised the wearers’ total lack of interest in prevailing norms of fashion. They stood in stationary queues encircling seven buffet tables running the length of Conron Hall. The buffets featured warming trays and sneeze-guarded stations housing all manner of dishes, ranging from Andouille sausage in Aldrogorian peppers to smoked zebra mussels in mushroomed wine. A number of senior academics had staked out fiefdoms at their favoured buffet stations, eating where they stood, refilling their own plates, dragging out conversations, and generally doing whatever they could in order to keep the traffic jammed.
Ian, Rhinnick, Nappy, Tonto, and Zeus, having swiped a handful of unclaimed name tags at the registration desk, sidled en masse up to the southernmost peninsula of the nearest buffet station, where dwelt the candied asparagus, lamb kebabs, and saffron-shellfish stew. Zeus and Nappy drifted slightly out of earshot, whispering at each other and holding hands.
“Now Tonto,” Rhinnick was saying, pushing on with a conversation that had started in the foyer, “I have, since the episode chez Vera, been conscious of a marked diminution — if diminution means what I think it does — in both the quantity and quality of the attention Zeus has paid to yours truly; this diminution matched by a marked increase in the exchange of moon-eyed glances, heartfelt sighs, and furtive whispers between the aforementioned lummox and young Nappy. Unseemly, what? Being a man of fine feelings, always sensitive to the delicacies and niceties of social intercourse, one wouldn’t typically mention it, let alone take steps to get in the way of pitched woo, but you’d think that in this modern, enlightened era, a chap could manage to keep the heart-fluttering, soul-awakening business out of the public eye while leaving a goodly amount of time for friends and colleagues. Pitch all the woo you like in private moments, one might say. Recite romantic poetry if you like. But keep a lid on it in public. And in the event that an ancient buddy — one who has had you at his side since first you ambled out of the Styx — requires a bit of commiseration, gendarming, or other expression of the proper feudal spirit, drop the romance, pick up your socks, and come across with the goods. I mean, Zeuses cannot live on Napoleons alone, and it’s dashed inconvenient for a Rhinnick to try to get his barges lifted and bails toted — or is it the other way ’round? — when his chief toter and lifter has given over to the sex. You’re a woman. State your views.”
“Zeus and Nappy are dating?” said Ian, astute observer of human affairs.
“Of course they are,” said Tonto. “They have been since the hospice.”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Well if you paid more attention to local issues than to missing wives and City Solicitors you’d be better able to keep abreast of current events,” said Rhinnick.
“Enough,” said Tonto. “Let’s start mingling. Ian’s supposed to be learning The Rules —”
“Whatever that means,” sighed Ian.
“That’s right,” said Tonto. “And you won’t find out what it means unless you start paying attention. Get in there. Someone’s bound to say something useful.”
The odds of this, in Ian’s view, seemed long. The few snippets of conversation he had overheard at various buffet stations had, up until this point, run along the following lines:
The Mashed Potatoes: “. . . or take the epistemological core of Heizen-Krantz’s ethical philology. Accounting for the introspective shifts of self along irreconcilable lines of duologic perspectivity, it’s clear that the antecedent captured ‘self’ of subjective experience inhabits — nay, constructs — its own teleological plane.”
Braised Lamb Kebabs with couscous (tut-tutting the mashed potatoes): “Your postulate ignores the interconnectedness of unit-selves within the modern gestalt experience; indeed, the imperative for one phenomenon to rebound upon and redefine the next, initiating dynamic states of mutual modification. The static state is a myth.”
Candied Asparagus: “Of course. That goes without saying.”
Ian wished that it had. At another buffet table he’d heard the following:
Carrot Soup with Stilton: “. . . but if you accept a finite curvature of space-time in this model, you must concede — unless you’re redefining your trans-dimensional matrix, ha, — that the scalar discrepancy you posit violates the third Redekopian Precept.”
&n
bsp; Braised Oxtail in Hempseed: “An excellent point well made. But if you’ll attend to footnote 232b, you’ll see that I counter this violation by adoption of Isaac’s recent cascading-world theory. An elegant solution, I think you’ll agree. Now — that cheese you’re hoarding — is that Stilton, Vermile, or blue?”
None of this, thought Ian, seemed particularly useful in the quest to find his wife. Still, trolling the buffet line was the only plan he had, and so the trolling continued, Zeus and Nappy tackling the nor’nor’east part of the Hall, with Tonto, Rhinnick, and Ian venturing sou’sou’west. After another twenty minutes or so spent listening in on academic exchanges, the troupe reconvened between the fondue and the martinis.
“Anything useful?” said Zeus.
“Who knows?” shrugged Ian. “I can’t understand most of what they’re saying.”
“Same here,” said Zeus.
“I suspect they don’t, either,” mused Tonto.
“Cynical,” observed Rhinnick.
“Zey do seem to enjoy talking,” said Nappy.
“And eating,” Rhinnick added. “I mean to say, they’re sailing into the steaks and chops like a vegan who thinks that no one’s watching.”
“The professor near the tempura pumpkin said that ‘everyone is defined and constituted by struggle,’” said Zeus, who seemed disturbed by this.
“Well, Abe bless him for it,” said Rhinnick, dismissively.
“But Mistress Oan says we can have whatever we want. If we believe it, we can achieve it!” said Zeus, reverently.
“I believe I’ll achieve a plate of lasagna,” said Ian, striking off for the appropriate lamp-warmed tray. His colleagues followed in a line. And it was there, at the lasagna, that they encountered the university’s Perpetual Chair of Marginal Studies, the esteemed Dr. Sammish V. Bartuckle. He was slightly rounder than most cardiovascular specialists would advise, and topped by a free-spirited wisp of grey-brown hair. Like the other buffet-squatters, he was keen on explaining the finer points of his scholarly pursuits — partly out of genuine academic zeal, and partly in the hope of deterring others from horning in on the lasagna. Here’s what he was saying when they arrived:
“We are, according to the theory I’ve developed, discrete and insular subdivisions of a single, larger entity that, in the time before Abe, fragmented its unified consciousness into smaller, non–mutually accessible components. These were deployed in a harsh environment in which they could be tested by adversity. The goal — described in layman’s terms — was for these discrete units of post-division consciousness to approach mutual understanding, and therefore assist in the composite whole’s self-understanding and actualization. This journey toward mutual (and therefore self-) discovery will ultimately be achieved through the pre-divided, collective entity’s subconscious examination of interacting, non-exclusionary subjectivity fields within a composite environmental overlay, which is to say,” he added, nodding excitedly, “the world.”
He stopped speaking, and nodded a series of staccato nods that made his wispy tuft of hair do calisthenics. He paused as though expecting a response. Rhinnick made it. It was this:
“So, we’re all the same chap, then.”
“In a manner of speaking —” began the Chair.
“All broken into individual bits.”
“That’s right,” said the Chair. “But what I suggest by —”
“And I,” Rhinnick continued, waving him off, “am evidently the bit that represents this über-being’s impulse for, by way of example, heroism, intelligence, suavity, and savoir-faire. And my colleague over there,” he added, pointing at Tonto, “is a slice of its protective instincts with a dash of oompus boompus and curvy whatnots. My girthy companion,” he continued, waving Zeusward, “is a filament of this über-being’s aspect of loyalty, fidelity, physical prowess, and whathaveyou.”
It was at this point that a man in eye-jarringly bright yellow trousers sidled up to the lasagna, slipping in directly between Ian and Tonto. He grinned a peculiar, toothy grin at each of them, exhibiting all the cocktail party savvy of people who wear pocket protectors and read books that are written from the dragon’s point of view.
He was, of course, wearing other articles of clothing apart from the bright yellow trousers. But when you’re wearing bright yellow trousers, the rest of your outfit doesn’t matter.
No one paid him the slightest bit of attention. Peculiar men were always sidling up to Tonto.
Rhinnick continued with his observations.
“And this,” he said, tapping Ian on a clavicle, “this chap is — well, there’s no need to mince words when waxing academically; we’re all scholars here — he’s this über-being’s self- incompetence and sad-sackishness. All perfectly consistent with documented observations,” he added, withdrawing his journal from a pocket with a flourish. “And the . . . the . . . I’m looking for a word here, the big fellow we’re all bits of —”
“The pre-divided consciousness,” offered the Chair.
“Quite,” said Rhinnick. “This pre-divided consciousness, this singular self-reflective bimbo, dreamt the universe into being in order to work through its own issues.”
“Broadly speaking,” agreed the Chair. This is professor-speak for ‘I agree with what you’re saying, but reserve a small escape hatch, just in case you’re trying to trap me.’”
The man in the yellow trousers munched a cheese straw contentedly, nodding at Rhinnick with obvious scholarly approval.
“So this über-consciousness,” said Rhinnick, stumbling over the umlaut, “of which we’re all aspects or fragments, is the creative force who built the world as a sort of laboratory thingummy into which he —”
“Or she,” said Nappy.
“Yes, yes,” conceded Rhinnick, “a sort of laboratory thingummy into which he or she — but more likely he, given the fact that this creator designed the outer crust of certain super-modelish guides — decanted bits of its subdivided consciousness into the world so they could muck about with each other and learn some important —”
“Yes — yes — through the interaction of the subdivided fragments. Just as you say,” said the Chair, excitedly.
“In other words: an Author,” Rhinnick concluded, spreading his hands in a broad, theatrical gesture.
This drew a grin from the yellow trousers and a puzzled frown from the Chair.
Rhinnick saw that his conclusion called for further elaboration.
“Authors,” he said, “create worlds. Their characters are aspects of their own personalities. They write whatever they write in order to work through their own psychological whatnots. It stands to reason that this über-consciousness you propose, this all-powerful chap who made the world and put us in it, is the Author himself, the One who wrote this world with a view to working through His personal whatnots. Makes perfect sense to me. It’s what I tried to explain to E.M. Peericks all along. I mean to say, ego fabularis my left eye.”
The man in the yellow trousers applauded giddily.
“That’s a . . . a reasonable distillation of the core tenets of my interacting subjectivity field hypothesis,” said the Chair, and he would have gone on further had he not been drowned out by an ear-splitting harrumph from the vicinity of the poached salmon.
The harrumpher was Woolbright Punt — esteemed member of Detroit’s Chamber of Commerce — present at DUs in his capacity as Professor Emeritus of Urban Engineering. He had a face like an angry walnut and a voice that was set to “eardrum-shattering bellow.” The target of his recent harrumph was a mousey assistant professor wearing a corduroy skirt and wire-rimmed glasses.
“Balderdash!” bellowed Punt, in that endearing way of his. “Your model of — what did you call your model?”
“Erm . . . a hypothetical psychological construct of utopian non-scarcity?” squeaked the assistant professor, quailing in her boots and backin
g into the braised duck.
“Ho! Utopian nonsense. Huaargh! Doesn’t work. Never will.”
“But it’s a hypothetical cons—”
“Bunk!” boomed Punt. “Utter bunk! Utopia! No such thing. Wouldn’t work. You can’t have people getting whatever they want whenever they want it.”
“But I simply use the model to show —”
“Take this bloke here,” said Punt, waddling straight at Ian, gripping his shoulder, and pivoting him to face the trembling assistant professor. “What’s your name, man?” said Punt.
Ian struggled to swallow a piece of cheese.
“Pimms,” said Tonto, stepping over to Ian’s side, treading meaningfully on his shoe, and making a series of wide-eyed faces, all with a view to telepathically conveying a complex message, viz: “We don’t want to be discovered, and you’re wearing a stolen name tag that says ‘Pimms.’ Don’t blow it.” What she said out loud was this: “His name’s Pimms. I’m Headly-Cripps. Pleased to meet you,” she added, tapping her own name tag for evidentiary support.
“Right ho,” said Punt. “As an aside, Ms. Headly-Cripps, has anyone told you that you look like that young woman from the lingerie ads? Uncanny really. I don’t suppose they can mention that in polite conversation, though, political correctness, sexual harassment, that sort of thing. Huaargh! Now where was I? Pah, right!” he bellowed. “Back to my point!” He revolved on his axis and faced the assistant professor, aiming a sausage-like thumb directly at Ian. “Take this Pimms chap. Assume that his biggest wish is to have . . . ahem . . . aha . . . well . . . physical relations with Headly-Cripps.”
Ian looked at Tonto. Tonto looked at Ian. Ian turned purple and swallowed his Adam’s apple. The man in the yellow trousers chortled quietly to himself. Punt steamed ahead.
“So, Pimms here wants to have relations with Headly-Cripps, but Headly-Cripps’s idea of a perfect day is one in which she doesn’t have to endure sex with Pimms. No offence intended. But you see my point. Either she gets her Utopia and avoids having sex with him, or he gets his Utopia and enjoys a roll in the hay. Can’t have both. It stands to reason.”
Beforelife Page 39