The Curiosity: A Novel

by Stephen Kiernan

  “Well, you’re right that it’s dull.” Gerber scratched his woolly scalp. “But that’s only half the story. It’s called a computer. Think of it as a telephone you can use to call anyone in the world.”

  “Telephone?” He narrowed his eyes. “I think I remember what that is.”

  Gerber turned to me for help. I held up open palms. “Oh, no, this is all you.”

  “Thanks a million.” He made a face, then turned back to Judge Rice. “Okay, do you remember what a telegraph is?”

  “I recall sending and receiving telegrams, yes.”

  “Well, today instead of dots and dashes going down the wires, we send a person’s voice. What this machine does is connect nearly all the wires on earth, which therefore connects all those voices. Also it stores the words we write, the pictures we take.” He tapped the headphones. “Even the songs we sing.”

  “When my friend here”—Judge Rice pointed at me—“says you people are recording everything I do, is this what she means?”

  “Here, watch this.” Gerber’s hands flew over the keyboard, and a video began playing on his screen. Judge Rice rested one hand on the podium. “For severity, the gale surpassed all experience. At no time was any portion of the ship level, nor reliable underfoot . . .”

  “Ha.” Judge Rice tapped a forefinger on his chin. “ ‘What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties.’ ”

  “Right. What you said.”

  “From Hamlet.”

  Gerber grinned goofily. “I suppose if I throw the Grateful Dead at you, it’s only fair that you lay Shakespeare on me.”

  “Do you realize how this invention could transform judicial proceedings? If all of the world could act as eyewitness?”

  “Wait a second, Romeo. You’ve been a judge long enough to doubt evidence, right? Check this out.” He slapped some keys, slid his mouse around to edit the footage. “Aw, you made it easy by standing so still.” Gerber hit enter, the machine spent ten seconds filling a status bar, then an equally smooth clip began to play on his screen. “The ship was level, reliable underfoot. It surpassed all experience.”

  Judge Rice burst out laughing. “But of course, of course. If humanity can find a means to new truths, it can also produce new lies.”

  “You learn fast, brother.” He touched the screen. “If you watch your left hand here, you’ll see it jumps slightly, which gives away my editing. If you look closely.”

  “Nonetheless it is an impressive tool. Does it contain maps?”

  “Of pretty much everything, yes. You can see the whole world, or your own street.”

  “How useful that would have been on our expedition,” Judge Rice said, bouncing a fist on his thigh.

  “Well now.” Gerber tilted his chair back. “We’ve heard about the bad part, but there must have been some good. What was your favorite thing about that trip, anyway?”

  “So many things.” He considered for a moment. “An example, if I may.”

  “Please.”

  I held my tongue, enjoying the moment unfolding in front of me.

  “We had been nine days a-sail from Thule, Greenland, halfway between the Arctic Circle and the pole. Our panorama was gray water, gray sky, white foam at the waterline, and little else. When we reached the coastline it revealed no human presence, only a landscape grim and austere. Then we spied an outpost as desolate as despair, a cluster of shacks populated by souls with hardy skins and rough language. Yet they welcomed us as kin, fed us like royalty, fish and other foods of which we were entirely ignorant, and with their coarse humor we passed the night laughing like children at a clown. Upon hoisting anchor the next dawn, pink skies and a pearl sea, we saw it all as if with new eyes.”

  “Saw what, your honor?”

  “The beauty of it all. Exploration became incidental to the experience of beauty.”

  “Yes,” I whispered. “Exactly.”

  We were silent, even Gerber, as though the world had paused. The drawing forward I felt in that moment was like how the moon pulls on tides. I did not admit to myself what I was feeling. Still, I must have been staring.

  “What is it?” asked Judge Rice, touching his cheek. “Do I have something on my face?”

  “Just whiskers,” I said, jerking away. “Only whiskers.”

  “Danger, danger, danger,” Gerber said in a robotic voice.

  “What is your meaning?”

  “Whiskers.” Gerber spun in his chair like a top. “Whiskers whiskers.”

  “You shut up.” I smacked him on the arm.

  “Dangerous whiskers.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Judge Rice.

  “Our friend here is an odd duck,” I explained. “Pay no attention.”

  “A duck with whiskers,” Gerber exclaimed, still spinning.

  The judge studied him a moment, then raised one finger. “About these machines,” he said. “If I may persist.”

  Gerber stopped abruptly, one foot hooked on the leg of his desk. “By all means.”

  “Why would you want to be able to talk to anyone in the world? Also why would they want to talk to you?”

  “A million reasons.” Gerber faced his computer, clicking through several windows. “To learn, to share knowledge, to gossip. People even fall in love through these machines. And look . . .” He scrolled through screens of e-mails. “These are letters, from all over the earth, people who are curious about you. More than anything, though, these boxes contain the greatest library ever imagined.”

  “How is that possible? They look entirely too small.”

  “It’s easier to show than to explain. Tell me a subject you’d like to know about. Something you were interested in, way back when.”

  “Quite simple,” Judge Rice said. “Aviation.”

  Gerber turned back from his screen. “Beg pardon?”

  “In 1903, two brothers flew an aircraft on the dunes of North Carolina. It became a fascination of mine. Mankind behaving like a bird, what could be more inventive? ‘To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.’ Oh, and I recollect from that night”—he faced me—“when you took me to the rooftop. I witnessed a huge flying machine, possibly the loudest thing I have ever heard. There. I would be interested to see what progress the world has made in aviation.”

  “Perfect choice,” Gerber said, rubbing his hands together. “A history of aviation. But I have to warn you . . .”

  “Yes, Dr. Gerber?”

  “You will be amazed at how creatures as smart as human beings could also be relentlessly stupid.”

  “Now, Gerber,” I said, “I know where you’re headed. There are two sides—”

  “No kibitzing,” he interrupted. “You said this was all on me, remember?”

  “Just don’t leave out the beauty.”

  “Not at all.” He patted Judge Rice on the knee. “That’s exactly where I intend to start. And in the year you went to sea.”

  Gerber, when it came to online searches, ran as quick as a weasel. In seconds he had information about 1906. That year the Germans invented zeppelins and the French created seaplanes. On the Fourth of July, an American flew an airplane nearly a mile. He also set a new speed record, forty-seven miles an hour.

  “Incredible,” Judge Rice said, shaking his head. “Like lightning.”

  Gerber searched year after year: when airmail began, the pilot held letter bags between his knees, dropping them overboard as he flew over their destination. Orville Wright crashed but survived, his passenger the first person to die in a powered airplane accident. And engineers moved the propellers from behind the wings to the front. He sniffed, typed, scrolled through search results.

  “Well, sunshine daydream, here’s a find,” Gerber said, “from 1912.” He clicked on a video that streamed historic footage, grainy and gray. A floating biplane set off amid blocks of ice in a cloudy harbor. Next a camera mounted on the plane revealed glimpses of an industrial shoreline and several blurry islands. Then in sharp relief, a
giant copper symbol flickered into view.

  “Oh, my heaven,” Judge Rice exclaimed. “The Statue of Liberty.”

  “Bingo.”

  “I’d forgotten.”

  “She’s still there,” Gerber said. “But now we reach the summer of 1914, and flying becomes a different business. Stupid takes over.” He showed clips of dogfights, photos of the first bombers, portraits of flying aces with white scarves thrown over their shoulders. “These are from the First World War.”

  “Truly the whole world at war?”

  “Probably felt that way. But look, they were even dumb enough to be optimistic about that. They called it ‘the war to end all wars.’ ”

  “Did it?”

  Gerber clucked, tapping his keys. “What do you think?”

  “Excuse me,” I said. I’d begun to think ahead, aviation in the next thirty years, and what Judge Rice was about to learn. The teacher in me could not keep mum. “I think we ought to put some balance in here, you know, Gerber?”

  “Balance the stupidity of human nature? Against what?”

  “Some of the good things, perhaps?”

  “Not a fair fight, stupid wins by a mile. But hey.” He pointed at the next desk. “That computer’s still on, Kate. Knock yourself out.”

  I leaned toward Judge Rice. “There’s a whole century of things for you to learn. Some of them may be tough to take.”

  “I appreciate your protective spirit, Dr. Philo.” He took a deep breath, released it slowly. “Permit us, though, to complete one line of thought.” He turned to Gerber. “How many people died in this war that failed to end all wars?”

  “Not sure.” Gerber slurped his coffee. “Twenty, twenty-five million?”

  Judge Rice blinked. “That can’t be right. Twenty-five million human beings?”

  “Give or take. Hang on.” Gerber tapped away. “Just pilots, since that’s our theme for the moment, let’s see.” He tried one search, then a second gave the answer. “Here we are. Twenty thousand pilots died.”

  I felt as stunned as Judge Rice looked. “It does not speak well of our kind,” he said. “We invented this machine, devised ideally for adventure, discovery, and economic utility, yet applied it to the opposite purposes.”

  “Well, the war ended eventually,” Gerber said. “Innovation didn’t. Look here: the first commercial flight, 1919, eleven paying passengers, Paris to London. No guns, no bombs, very nice. And in 1921 the first African American pilot.”

  “African American?”

  “That means he is a black man. A Negro.”

  “A colored?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But today we use respectful words. We don’t want to offend anyone. You would probably do best to refer to black people as African Americans.”

  “We do not want to offend black people?” Judge Rice rubbed his chin. “Hm. Excellent.”

  “You think so?” Gerber said.

  He nodded. “My father fought in the War Between the States. And in my time, any fool could see the unfairness in work and wages. It also appeared in my courtroom, of course, almost daily.”

  “Huh.” Gerber scratched his head. “Well, people feel even more strongly about it today. Let’s keep playing history, though. Here’s the first parachute, so people can jump out of planes and not get squished like a bug . . . aaaand here’s an early crop duster.”

  “What is that aircraft dropping?”

  “Chemicals to kill weevils on plants, mosquitoes, and things like that.”

  “I much prefer hearing these peaceable uses for flying. But I imagine you could drop poison on your enemies in much the same way.”

  “You have no idea how inventive we are in that department,” Gerber said. “Us stupid humans? We drop things on enemies like nobody’s business.”

  “But that’s not the whole story,” I said.

  Gerber sniffed. “You bringing up that silly balance thing again?”

  “Half a second.” I flounced into the desk beside him, performing a search of my own. “Judge Rice, do you see this picture? That’s Robert Goddard, standing beside the first liquid-fueled rocket. Goes straight up into the sky, for miles.” I hit some more keys. “That was in 1926, the same year a new flying speed record was set of more than two hundred and fifty miles an hour.”

  “Two hundred and fifty?”

  “From here to the Statue of Liberty in under an hour.”

  “I marvel.” Judge Rice grinned. “In my time, that journey took a good week on horseback.”

  “Well . . .” I tapped in another search. “Two years later somebody broke three hundred. Meanwhile a man flew solo across the Atlantic.”

  “In one flight?”

  Gerber chuckled. “Not exactly a lot of refueling stops along the way.”

  “But such a distance . . .”

  “Yes,” I said. “Since we’d achieved faster and farther, somebody had to go higher. Here’s a man in 1930, a balloonist, he reached forty-three thousand feet up. The next year, another man reached fifty-one thousand. Oh, here you go, this is a good one. Right at the height of the Depression—let’s see . . . that was a period of economic calamity, banks failed, stocks plunged, dust storms destroyed farms, millions of people were out of work—”

  “You’re doing a great job of making this uplifting,” Gerber said.

  “All right,” I conceded. “Perhaps Judge Rice would be glad he missed that era. But in the middle of all of those problems, Wiley Post did a ton to lift people’s spirits, and he did it with flying. He was a colorful man, see him here with the patch over one eye? Anyway in 1933, he was the first person to fly solo all the way around the world. Fifteen thousand five hundred and ninety miles.”

  “In 1933, you say.” Judge Rice lowered his eyelids, doing mental math. “If not for the expedition, I might still have been alive.”

  “Well, huh,” said Gerber. “Still, you wouldn’t have always been pleased by what you saw. We haven’t even touched World War Two.”

  “There was another war?”

  “There have been wars damn near all of the time that you were gone.”

  “But couldn’t these inventions unite us? Create a common ground?”

  “They did,” I interjected. “Millions of people are connected all over the world now. We continually grow in our knowledge and appreciation of people who live differently.”

  “Either that”—Gerber laughed—“or we kill them.”

  Judge Rice sighed. “I am fatigued. Before I rest, however, and set my mind to work on understanding all of this, I’d like to see the limit, if I may. The outer edge of what humanity has done with aviation thus far.”

  Gerber looked at me. “Is that okay?”

  “You’re asking my opinion?” I said. “Then no, I would rather you didn’t.”

  “Is history as terrible as all that?” Judge Rice asked.

  “He’s going to find out eventually anyway,” Gerber said.

  I had no answer, which Gerber interpreted as assent. “Okay, Judge, I’ll show you. But it ain’t pretty.” He typed away on his keyboard. “I think I’ll skip the Hindenberg, and start with this.” He cut to a clip from Vietnam, the streak of a jet, a douse of napalm, the jungle bursting into flame. “Not exactly slapping mosquitoes, are we? Now, for your viewing pleasure, we have the drone, a flying bomb controlled by someone far away.” A missile streaked low and loud across the sky of a desert village. On the ground, men in turbans cowered, pointing and shouting.

  “Next we have a jet itself used as a weapon.” I knew what Gerber would show then, and sure enough, the silver bird swept in on that cloudless September morning and impaled itself on a tower of steel and glass. I have seen that image a thousand times; it still stabs me.

  “Oh, my heaven,” Judge Rice said. “Oh, my Lord.”

  “For a while, that was the tallest building in the world,” Gerber continued as the first tower collapsed on itself. He kept typing, calling up information without mercy.

  “Here’s t
he real deal, your honor, the outer limit. Armageddon in a can.” He played a compilation of nuclear explosions: instant suns in the desert and on the ocean, cars tossed and buildings shredded, one mushroom cloud after another. “The good news is that you’re just seeing tests here. Only two of these bad boys have been used as weapons. But then again, each one leveled an entire city.”

  I pulled my eyes from the screen to see Judge Rice with both hands over his mouth. I put a hand on his shoulder. “All you all right?”

  “The violence of it,” he said. “Such laudable ambition, such courage and invention, all perverted into methods of killing.”

  “It’s not that easy.” Gerber picked up his coffee mug but paused before drinking. “Think of the war your father fought in. Would you send him into battle with an inferior rifle? Or was the weapon somehow justified by what he hoped victory would bring?”

  “But an entire city, with one bomb? And that building, using the aircraft like a giant bullet? We turned genius into sorrow.”

  “Time to step in here,” I said. “We need to give some perspective.”

  “Come on, Kate,” Gerber said. “Don’t go sugarcoating—”

  “Judge Rice, I’m not saying anything you’ve seen tonight is false. But there are balancing things. There is another side.”

  “In truth,” he said in a low voice, “I hope so.”

  “I may not be as quick online as my friend here, but take a look at this.” I typed in a search, then streamed a video of wooden crates floating down from the sky under white parachutes. “This is a food drop. For a city on the ocean that was flooded by an earthquake out to sea. The roads are destroyed, the people are cut off. Using planes, we are giving them food, medicine, materials for shelter.”

  “Aw, shall I break out the violins?” Gerber said.

  I scowled until I saw that he was smiling. He widened his eyes, rolling them side to side, the kook. I smiled back.

  “Then there’s beauty. Some people have turned flying into art.”

  I found a video of a man with a hang glider. He stepped off the side of a snowy mountain, sailing into the thermals. He was skilled with his giant kite, tipping up on one wing, then plunging near the ground only to loft away again, hover, finally glide off into the scenic distance. A dance in the air.