River of Gods (13 page)

"So, Ms. Durnau, your best idea," Thomas Lull said across
the wide desk with her CV and presentation file on it and beyond the
picture window, wider Kansas in the hottest June this century.

"Where were you when it came to you?"

(She flashbacks to this, twenty-two hours out from ISS, twenty-six to
Darnley 285, stuffed full of flight drugs and zipped up in a bag
velcroed to the wall of the transfer pod so she doesn't get in the
way of Captain Pilot Beth who has a slightly blocked right nostril
and whose breath whistles rhythmically until it is the biggest thing
in Lisa Durnau's universe.)

No one had known a June like it; the airport staff, the car rental
girl, the university security man she asked for directions. This was
more than hot water off the coast of Peru or the dying thrash of the
Gulf Stream. Climatology had run into the white zone where nothing
could be predicted any more. Thomas Lull had flipped through her CV,
glanced at the first page of her presentation and when she flashed up
the first slide, stopped her with that curve-ball question.

Lisa Durnau can still recall the surge of anger. She pressed her
hands palm-down on to the thighs of her good pant suit to push the
rage down. When she lifted them she had left two palm-shaped sweat
marks like warnings against the evil eye.

"Professor Lull, I'm trying to be professional here and I think
you owe me the professional courtesy of your attention."

She could have stayed in Oxford. She had been happy in Oxford. Carl
Walker would have sold body parts to keep her at Keble. Better
doctorates than hers had returned shattered from this cow town where
the schools by law still taught Intelligent Design. If the world's
preeminent centre for cyberlife research sar on a hill in the Bible
Belt, Lisa Durnau would come to that hill. She had rejected her
father's Christian universe before he and her mother separated, but
Presbyterian stubbornness and self-reliance were twined around her
DNA. She would not let this man shake her. He said, "You can
earn my attention by answering my question. I want to know about your
inspiration. Those moments when it hit you like lightning. Those
moments when you ran for seventy hours on coffee and Dexedrine
because if you ler go of it, even for an instant, you'd lose it. The
moments when it came out of the void and was all there, perfect and
entire. I want to know how and when and where it hit you. Science is
creation. Nothing else interests me."

"Okay," Lisa Durnau said. "It was the women's toilet
in Paddington Station in London, England."

Professor Thomas Lull beamed and settled back in his chair.

The Cognitive Cosmology group met twice monthly in Stephen Sanger's
office at Imperial College London. It was one of those things that
Lisa Durnau knew she should get round to some time but probably never
would, like balancing her cheque book or having children. Carl Walker
would cc. her its notes and abstracts. It was intellectually
thrilling and she had no doubt that membership of the group would
advance her name and career, but theirs was a quantum informational
approach and Lisa's thoughts moved in topological curves. Then the
bimonthly reports began to stray from quantum informational judder
into speculation that Artificial Intelligence could indeed be a
parallel universe mapped out in computing code as Oxford's cloisters
and choristers were in elementary particles and DNA. This was her
bailiwick. She resisted for a month, then Carl Walker took her our
for a Friday lunch that ended up in a Jamaican restaurant at midnight
drinking Triple-X Guinness and swaying to the towers of dub. Two days
later she was in a fifth-floor conference room breakfasting on
chocolate croissants and smiling too much at the country's leading
thinkers on the place of mind in the structure of the universe.

Everyone recharged coffee cups and the discourse began. The speed of
debate left Lisa slipstreamed and breathless. The transcripts gave no
indication of the breadth and diversity of discussion. She felt like
a fat kid at a basketball match, clutching and darting too late, too
slow. By the time Lisa got to speak she was responding to things said
three ideas ago and the climate of the conversation had raced on. The
sun moved across Hyde Park and Lisa Durnau felt herself settling into
despair. They were fast and quick and dazzling and they were wrong
wrong wrong but she couldn't get a word in to tell them. They were
already becoming bored with the subject. They had milked it for what
they thought it could yield and were moving on. She was going to lose
it. Unless she told them. Unless she spoke now. Her right forearm lay
flat on the oak table. She slowly raised her hand to the vertical.
Every eye followed it. There was a sudden, terrible hush.

"Excuse me," Lisa Durnau said. "Can I say something
here? I think you're wrong." Then she told them about the idea
that made life, mind, and intelligence emerge from the underlying
properties of the universe as mechanically as physical forces and
matter. That CyberEarth was a model of another universe that could
exist in the polyverse, a universe where mind was not an emergent
phenomenon but a fundamental like the Fine Structure constant, like
Omega, like dimensionality. A universe that
thought.
Like God,
she said and as she said those words she saw the gaps and the flaws
and the bits she hadn't thought through and she knew that every face
around the table saw them, too. She could hear her own voice,
hectoring, so so certain, so so sure she had all the answers at
twenty-four. She railed off into an apologetic mumble.

"Thank you for that," Stephen Sanger said. "There are
a lot of interesting ideas in there."

They did not even let him finish his sentence. Chris Drapier from the
Level Three Artificial Intelligence Unit at Cambridge sprang first.
He had been the rudest and loudest and most pedantic and Lisa had
caught him trying to size up her ass in the queue for the coffee
flask. There was no reason to invoke some
deus ex machina
argument when quantum computation had the whole thing sewn up pretty
nicely. This was vitalism—no, this was
mysticism
. Next
up was Vicki McAndrews from Imperial. She picked a loose theoretical
thread in her modelling, tugged it, and the whole edifice unravelled.
Lisa didn't have a topological model of the space or even a mechanism
for describing this universe that thought. All Lisa could hear was
that high-pitched whine behind her eyes that is the sound when you
want to cry but must not. She sat, annihilated among the coffee cups
and chocolate croissant smears. She knew nothing. She had no talent.
She was arrogant and stupid and shot her mouth off when any sensible
postgrad would have sat and nodded and kept everyone's coffee cups
filled and the cookies coming round. Her star was at its absolute
nadir. Stephen Sanger passed some encouragement as Lisa crept out,
but she was destroyed. She cried her way back across Hyde Park, up
through Bayswater to Paddington Station. She downed a half bottle of
dessert wine in the station restaurant as that seemed the menu item
that would get her whacked really quickly. She sat at her table
shuddering with shame and tears and the certainty that her career was
over, she could not do this thing, she didn't know what they meant.
Her bladder called ten minutes before her train. She sat in the
cubicle, jeans around her knees, trying not to sob out loud because
the acoustics of London station toilets would take it and amplify it
so everyone could hear.

And then she saw it. She could not say what it was she saw, staring
at the cubicle door, there was no shape, no form, no words or
theorems. But it was there, whole and unimaginably beautiful. It was
simple. It was so simple. Lisa Durnau burst from the cubicle, rushed
to the Paperchase store, bought a pad and a big marker. Then she ran
for her train. She never made it. Somewhere between the fifth and
sixth carriages, it hit her like lightning. She knew exactly what she
had to do. She knelt sobbing on the platform while her shaking hands
tried to jam down equations. Ideas poured through her. She was
hardwired to the cosmos. The evening shift detoured around her, not
staring. It's all right, she wanted to say. It's so all right.

M-Star Theory. It was there all along, right in front of her. How had
she not seen it? Eleven dimensions folded into a set of Calabi-Yau
shapes, three extended, one time-like, seven curled up at Planck
length. But the handles, the holes in the shapes, dictated the
winding energies of the superstrings, and thus the harmonics that
were the fundamental physical properties. All she had to do was model
CyberEarth as a Calabai-Yau space and show its equivalence to a
physical possibility in M-Star theory. It was all in the strucrure.
Out there was a universe with its onboard computer built in. Minds
were part of the fabric of reality there, not shelled in evolved
carbon as they were in this bubble of the polyverse. Simple. So
simple.

She cried with joy all the way home in the train. A young French
tourist couple sat across the table, nervously touching every time
Lisa shuddered to a new attack of bliss. Joy bursts would send her
wandering out of her room and through Oxford in the week she wrote up
her insights. Every building, every street, every shop and person
filled her with fierce delight at life and humanity. She was in love
with every last thing. Carl Walker had flicked through the draft,
grin growing wider with every page. Finally he said, "You've got
them. Fuckers."

Sitting in Thomas Lull's over-air-conditioned office, Lisa Durnau
could still catch the emotional afterglow of that outburst, like the
microwave echo of the fires of the big bang. Thomas Lull swivelled
his chair, leaned towards her.

"Okay," he said. "Well, two things you should know
about this place. It's got a fucking awful climate, but the people
are mighty friendly. Be polite to them. You may need them."

For Thomas Lull's amusement today, Dr. Darius Ghotse has a set of
recordings of the English comedy classic "It's That Man Again"
in the boot of the tricycle that he labours along the sand tracks of
Thekkady. He is anticipating slipping the file into Professor Lull's
machine and the plummy voice blaring out the signature tune. "One
hundred and five years old!" he will say. "When the bombs
were falling on London, this was what they were listening to in their
underground railway tunnels!"

Dr. Ghotse collects antique radio programmes. Most days he calls
around for breakfast with Thomas Lull on his boat and they sit under
the palm-thatch awning to sip chai and listen to the alien humour of
the Goons or the hyperreal comedy of Chris Morris's
Blue Jam.
Dr. Ghotse has a particular fondness for BBC Radio. He is a widower
and former paediatrician but in his heart of hearts, he is an
Englishman. He wishes Thomas Lull could understand cricket. He could
then share his classic Aggers and Johnners Test commentaries with
him.

He rattles down the rutted lane that runs beside the backwater,
kicking at chickens and insolent dogs. Without braking, he swerves
the aged red trike off the track, up the gangplank, and on to a long,
mat-roofed kettuvallam. It is a manoeuvre he has performed many
times. It has never yet ended him in the water.

Thomas Lull has Tantric symbols painted on his coconut thatch and a
name on the hull in white:
Salve Vagina.
They offend local
Christians mightily. The priest has informed him thus. Thomas Lull
counterinformed him that he (priest) could criticise him (Lull) when
he could do so in as good Latin as his boat title. A small high-power
satellite dish is gaffer-taped to the highest point of the sloped
roof-mats. An alcohol generator purrs in the stern.

"Professor Lull, Professor Lull." Dr. Ghotse ducks under
the low eave, fileplayer held high. As usual, the houseboat smells of
incense, alcohol, and stale cooking. A Schubert quintet plays,
mid-volume. "Professor Lull?"

Dr. Ghotse finds Thomas Lull in his small, neat bedroom that is like
a wooden shell. His shirts and shorts and socks are laid our on
pristine cotton. He folds his T-shirts the proper way, sides to the
middle, then triple-crease. A lifetime spent among suitcases has made
this second nature.

"What has happened?" Dr. Ghotse asks. "Time to move
on," Thomas Lull says.

"A woman, then?" Dr. Ghotse asks. Thomas Lull's appetite
for, and success with, the girlis from the beach circuit has always
baffled him. Men should be self-contained in later life, without
attachments.

"You could say. I met her last night at the club. She had an
asthma attack. I saved her. There's always someone frying their
coronary arteries on salbutamol. I offered to teach her some Bureyko
tricks and she turned round and said, I will see you tomorrow,
Professor Lull. She knew my name, Darius. Time to go."

When Dr. Ghotse met Thomas Lull, Lull had been working in an old
record shop, a beach bum among the ancient compact discs and vinyls.
Dr. Ghotse had been a recently bereaved pensioner, chipping away at
his grief laugh by antique laugh. He found a kindred soul in this
sardonic American. Afternoons passed in conversation, recordings
shared. But it was still three months before Dr. Ghotse invited the
man from the record shop for afternoon tea. Five visits later, when
the afternoon tea turned into evening gin watching the astonishing
sunsets behind the palms, Thomas Lull confided his true identity. At
first Dr. Ghotse felt sullied, that the man at the record shop he had
got to know was an effigy of lies. Then he felt burdened: he did not
wish to be the receptor of this man's loss and rage. Then he felt
privileged; owner of a world-class secret that could have netted him
a fortune from the news channels. He had been entrusted. In the end,
he realised that he had approached Thomas Lull with the same agenda,
for someone to entrust and listen.