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“I hope so. They can warm it up for us. God, when was the last time we did it in the yard?”
“Not since Amelia learned about doorknobs.”
“Go have children,” Lola said.
Zwick wandered back and sat at the table and poured himself a couple of fingers of old rum. Paz and Lola joined him.
“Where’s the girlfriend?” Lola asked. “Strangled?”
“Passed out in the hammock. It’s all your fault, Paz, you and your daiquiris and your añejo and your ontological speculations. Did you know that physics is a patriarchal conspiracy to promote a dominant worldview? As is medicine.”
“Well, when you solve the mystery of consciousness it won’t matter,” said Paz. “You can recode everyone’s brain.”
Zwick laughed, a little more elaborately than the comment deserved. “Yeah, and what if that changes physics? Listen, you want me to tell you the secret of the universe?” He mimed a paranoid looking over both shoulders. “Don’t tell anyone. Okay, so let’s say we have these vast pillars of physics, relativity and quantum electrodynamics, and they’re both as elaborately confirmed as anything in the world. Maybetoo elaborately confirmed, out to a part per billion or more. Now, you’re a detective, right? What if I told you that every time there’s been a physical breakthrough, we’ve found a piece of abstract math that’s just tailor-made to fit the new concept? Einsteinjust happened to find Riema
“I’d look for a frame-up. Or it might just be a slam dunk.”
“Yes! Butwhich? That’s the killer question. Now let’s say they confirm string theory physically. Let’s say it’s Hawking’s conjecture that black holes radiate outside their event horizons, and we find a black hole small enough to study and string theory predicts that radiation exactly. Then we know it’s true, hallelujah! Physics has the theory of everything at last, except…except what if we made it all up? Observation is a slender reed when you come right down to it. Thousands of astronomers observed the skies and fit their observations into the Ptolemaic system, making loops and littler loops to save the appearances until the whole thing collapsed, but string theory can’t collapse because it’s a theory of everything, everything is already accounted for, and confirmed by a zillion observations. But observation itself is a product of consciousness, andwe don’t know what that is!”
“Why you’re a doc now.”
“Why I’m a doc. So let’s say I’m wrong, John Searle and all of them are wrong, consciousness is not a little trick of the brain, let’s say it’s its own thing, a basic constituent of the universe on a par with space-time and mass, that only occasionally comes to rest in brains but has its own life, maybe down in the Calabi-Yau spaces or out in some co
“But you don’t believe that,” said Paz. His throat was suddenly dry, and he poured himself a little of the fruit juice they had laid out for the child.
“Nah, this is just drunk talk. But let’s say itis true we did discover the secret of consciousness, just like we discovered the secret of the physical world, and then there would be these two new pillars of knowledge, the exterior and the interior worlds reaching up to the heavens, and then some Einstein would come along and figure out how they locked together. Then what? We might hear a buzzer, likee
“This is not going to happen soon, is it?” asked Lola. “Because I just dropped off a big load of dry cleaning.”
Zwick snatched up a candle and held it under his chin, and in a horror-movie voice intoned, “We would be like GODS! Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
And they all laughed, but each was a little uneasy in the laughter, each for a different reason.
Six
Je
She was supposed to watch him as well, which was not difficult, much easier than minding a kid, for he was in general docile and gentle. In the mornings, when she did her chores, and during the times, as now, when she had to prep and serve food, she parked him in front of the big TV in the living room. They had cable, and she usually punched up a nature program for him. He seemed to like these, and he would also sit solemnly with her while she took inOne Life to Live, her favorite show, although here she had to explain what was going on, because it was kind of hard to get into the plot if you hadn’t been watching for a long time.
She poured the smoothie into the special smoky green glass that Rupert liked to drink it from, placed it on a serving tray, added Luna’s herbal tea and Geli’s coffee and Professor Cooksey’s regular tea, extra-strong with milk, a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a Sprite for herself, and brought it into the office. They were all talking about Moie and what to do about him now that there was this murder of the old Cuban guy, and she was sort of interested in that, so after she’d placed the tray on the table and everybody had their stuff, she sat down in a chair away from the meeting table and listened. That was cool according to Rupert because she wasn’t to think of herself as anything but a full member of the community and not just, like, a maid or anything. Which she mostly thought. She had been an actual maid at one time and so she knew the difference.
Je