Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

The attention made C. glow until New Year's.

But in the long run, attention made her worse. All that winter C. declined. Only love could have done her any good. And of available loves, only the unearned kind would have worked. But C. could not free herself from her certainty that unearned meant undeserved. Each letter in the box, every call from family or friend hit C. like an accusation. She began to shape her adult story: every life decision she had ever taken was a small disappointment to someone. And each disappointment was a savings stamp pasted in the final book.

We trudged through to spring. The thought that her unhappiness must be weighing me down made C. even more unhappy than she thought she was. Worse, the thought fulfilled its own prediction. Her fright alone began to weigh me down. Or, not her fright, but the anchor of helpless love it lodged in my heart.

Two years in a U. we no longer belonged to left us partners in fear. I can see it in the one photograph I still own of her from that time. That look of crumpled panic passing for a smile in front of the lens will forever make me want to cry out and rush to her in her pain. And how much worse, that pain, when she declared its source in my need to comfort her.

"Buddy. Buddy. What do you want? Tell me. Just talk to me. How can I make you happier?"

"You could leave me," she announced one night.

She might as well have accused me of murder. I stared into a face from which all impression of the woman I knew had fled.

"You should, you know. It's no more than I deserve."

We skipped the Balzac installment for that night. What we needed to read each other then was our own manuscript in progress. No line or paragraph or whole chapter that couldn't be blotted. Nothing in our style that we couldn't render blessedly direct by a joint edit. But C. harbored a deep hostility toward words. They only increased the odds of her missing the mark. Extended her sense of betrayal.

We tried to talk. The more I raced, the more C. seized up. She froze, the rabbit in that Larkin poem I'd read for Taylor ten years before. The creature that thought it might slip the notice of a fatal epidemic by keeping stock-still and waiting.

When words didn't work, we tried our bodies. I kissed her boxer's shoulders, her ribs and flinching thighs. I thought to take resentment's nodes out of her muscles into my mouth, digest them. I tried. C. talked then. But her words were voiceless phonemes of distress that carried no message but their desperate pitch.

Time has unlimited patience. It replays its summer stock forever, until we at last get the point. Its paths get laid down until we can walk nowhere else, even if there were an elsewhere in the undergrowth to walk.

C. came home from her office one evening, laughing. "You're not going to believe this. They want to promote me to Personnel Officer I."

I squeezed her in congratulations. She stayed limp. "Of course they do," I scolded. "It took them long enough, didn't it?" All I ever wanted was to give her whatever she needed. But what she needed more than all else was not to be given anything.

I saw the frightened-rabbit look stealing in behind her eyes. I've been good. A good girl. I never asked anyone for anything. Why are you doing this to me?

"Beauie. Beauie." She tittered, shaking her head. "I gotta get out of here."

Lentz burst in once when I was showing Imp E simple shapes. "That bastard Plover is giggling at me in the halls."

"And it's my damn fault, isn't it?"

He drew up short. "Marcel, you are getting smarter and smarter. Every day in every way."

"He's right, you know. Harold's right. Diana's right. Ram is. Even Chen and Keluga are right."

"The hell they are." Lentz's refusal was clipped. But his agitation was wide enough to knock a precarious mound of fanfold printout to the floor. He leaned to pick up the mess, a gesture that stopped midway in a flourish of disgust at the futility of cleaning up after himself. "Right about what?"

"Right about neural nets not being the answer."

"What's the question, Marcel?"

"How is E going to know anything? Knowledge is physical, isn't it? It's not what your mother reads you. It's the weight of her arm around you as she—"

"By all means, Marcel. Put your arm around it as you read. I encourage you. You mean you haven't been hugging it as you go along?"

"Reading knowledge is the smell of the bookbinding paste. The crinkle of thick stock as the pages turn. Paper the color of aged ivory. Knowledge is temporal. It's about time. You know how that goes, Engineer. Even you must remember that. 'We can read these three pages before your sisters and brothers come home for dinner.' "

"You're still talking about stimulus and response. Multidimensional vectors, shaped by feedback, however complicated. You're talking about an associative matrix. What else have we been doing but building one of those?"

"But Imp E's matrix isn't human. Human knowledge is social. More than stimulus-response. Knowing entails testing knowledge against others. Bumping up against them."

"Our matrix is bumping up against you. It's bumping up against the lines you feed it."

"It could bump up against word lists forever and never have more than a collection of arbitrary, differentiated markers."

"And what do we humans have?" Lentz removed his glasses to wipe them. As monstrous as he looked with them on, he was even worse without.

"More." I didn't know what, at the moment. But there had to be more. "We take in the world continuously. It presses against us. It burns and freezes."

"Save it for the award committees, Marcel. We 'take in the world' via the central nervous system. Chemical symbol-gates. You read my bit on long-term potentiation."

"Imp E doesn't take things in the way we do. It will never know—"

"It doesn't have to." He shoved more papers on the floor for emphasis. "It doesn't have to 'know,' whatever the hell you mean by that. You've been reading Plover's voodoo neurology, haven't you? All our box has to do is paraphrase a couple of bloody texts."

" 'I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end.' How is it ever going to explicate that, let alone paraphrase it?"

"I don't know. Teach the thing anger. Make it furious. In my impression, you can be pretty good at that."

"By June, right?"

"Hmm."

"Literary commentary on any book on the list? As good as your random twenty-two-year-old."

"As judged by Gunga Din himself."

"Or public retraction and apology."

"Come on, Marcel. We've been through this. Let's get on with it. Today's training."

"I'd be polishing the retraction if I were you."

"Don't remind me. That damn Plover. He's going to write it for us and make us put our names to it. Well. What better way to meet our fate than facing fearful odds?"

He replaced his glasses and sat down to training. We were working that day on compound subjects. What seas what shores what gray rocks and what islands. He had a list of simple sentence forms using words E already had in its fragile, denotative grasp. E's task was to recast the sentences we fed it. In today's case, find the conjunction, remove it, and split the compound into two.

When we'd done half a dozen examples and E was responding with a speed indicative of boredom, I reached out casually and shut the office door. No machine without muscle would ever be able to decode such a gesture. Some pretense of noise in the hallway. Ridiculous, after these long weeks of working in the open.

The door swung shut, surrendering the image fastened to its inside. On Diana's suggestion, I'd already sneaked a look at the hidden shrine. I'd seen the photograph, and it knocked the breath out of me. Now I wanted to see Lentz's face when the concealed photo looked back at us.