Laura spun to face him, laughing despite her anger. "I get it! I'm a card-carrying 'communalist'? I suppose there's one behind every [garbled]. We communalists are bent on global domination, you know."
Gray was smiling. "I don't know why I'm here. I'm sorry, Mr. Gray, if your computer misled you into hiring me — a communalist. I'll be happy to return your money because we communalists think property is theft, you know."
Gray laughed loudly. "Have a seat," he said, and Laura felt a wave of fatigue wash over her as the alcohol began to take effect.
She returned to the sofa and sank heavily into the plush leather.
"Would you like another drink?"
"I don't know. It kind of depends on whether you're through ridiculing my beliefs."
Gray rose and held out his hand. She emptied her glass and gave it to him. He continued his dissertation from the bar. "Philosophy, ideology, politics, religion — they're all interrelated. So are family, science, sex, power. Practically everything is connected to a greater or lesser extent. You've hit the right mark with all that. But where you go wrong is on page forty-two, third paragraph."
Laura quickly opened the paper and found the page. "You say there," Gray continued, "that 'A self is only a subject position in an infinite web of discourses.'"
She found the words, exactly as Gray had quoted them. "I know what you know about a myriad of things. From the definition of anosognosia to the words of the national anthem, we share a common knowledge domain. But your perspective on that shared, communal knowledge varies from mine because we occupy slightly different relative positions in the social web."
Her head was lowered, and the fire popped in the suddenly silent room. "Go on," she said.
"That's where you make your mistake. It's very subtle, but it's so fundamental as to render your conclusion invalid. You see people as 'mere' positions in the social web. What we know and believe are only components of the all-important society of which we're a part. We're just a link in the continuum that is modified subtly with each passing generation of an ever-evolving culture." He spoke rapidly — preaching with deeply felt conviction. "When one of us dies, the culture doesn't die, it lives on. When we discover or invent something, it's just the gradual accretion of knowledge by the culture. We've built up a cult of the individual. We've based everything from religion to capitalism on the mistaken belief that the individual really does exist, and that we're not all just ants in an ant bed."
Laura looked up at Gray's eyes. They glistened in the light from the fireplace.
"But I'm here to tell you that the myth is not that there are individuals. The myth is that there is a collective. The collective never dies because the collective was never alive in the first place! We are all just individuals motivated first and foremost by a desire for self-preservation. Not necessarily the preservation of our biological lives, but the protection of that thing within us that defines who we are. Parents will rush to their deaths into a burning building to save their child not because society evolved that trait to rationally perpetuate the existence of the collective. Better to let the child perish and save the productive adult! Parents will rush headlong into that burning building because their self has certain fundamental characteristics, one of which is to save the lives of their children. There's no alternative for that self. If it doesn't send its host into the fire, the self that saves its children from harm will perish forever just as surely as if it had been consumed in the fire with its host."
Gray fell silent, and Laura felt drained. She didn't know if it was the alcohol, or the lack of sleep, or emotional exhaustion from the force of Gray's thoughts.
"I came here to talk about the computer," she mumbled.
"It's late. We'll talk in the morning."
Laura started to object, but he rose to his feet and she joined him. For a moment, they stood face-to-face without speaking. Laura said good night and went up to her room. She was sound asleep in minutes.
20
Joseph kissed Dorothy's lips, then her neck, then her shoulder.
He moved lower.
Laura's eyes shot open. She was in her bed, suddenly wide-awake.
Though she knew it had been a dream, an unpleasant feeling lingered. The gray light of dawn glowed dimly around the curtains.
Laura rose and dressed for a run, hoping to cleanse herself of the poor start to her day. But a disturbing memory of the dream still remained, and Laura slowly came to doubt that the woman in Gray's bed had been Dorothy. The thought disturbed her anew, and she headed out for a jog with a frown on her face.
At the bottom of the stairs she met Janet, who was organizing the morning work for her staff. "Morning, Janet."
"Oh, good morning, Dr. Aldridge. Pardon me, but would you mind waiting here for a second." Janet sent the staff on their way and disappeared toward the back of the house. Laura loitered on the marble floors of the foyer, wondering at Janet's odd request. She took the opportunity to stretch, her running shoes squeaking on the polished marble floors.
"Good morning, Laura," Gray said as he emerged from between the twin staircases. He wore running shorts and shoes, and a T-shirt that read "I Shop, Therefore I Am." Laura burst out laughing.
"What?" Gray asked with a smile, and Laura pointed at the words on his shirt. "Oh," he said, burying his chin in his chest as he read. "It was a Christmas present from one of my employees." He clearly hadn't known anything was written on it. "Do you mind if I run with you this morning?"
"Outside? You mean where the temperature isn't exactly seventy-two degrees, and there are bugs and potholes and all manner of random variables?"
"I'll try anything once," he said with a grin.
They headed for the door. "Are you sure you don't want to wire yourself up to a machine and just imagine that you run?" Laura asked jokingly.
"'The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation,'" Gray replied with a quote.
"Would you cut that out!"
"What?"
"Testing me! Nobody told me this week was going to be some kind of pop quiz for geniuses."
Gray just shrugged. They began their run up the circular drive. "That was David Hume, right?" Laura asked. "The quote?" Gray nodded.
At the gate, Laura turned left toward the tunnel but Gray headed right. Laura caught up with him, and they jogged toward the guardhouse where she'd been confronted by the soldiers.
"I read your published paper last night after you went to bed," Gray said. "The one from the Artificial Intelligence Symposium in Houston." They continued their ascent of the ridge, and Laura waited for Gray to go on. "Let me see if I can summarize your ideas."
"Jeez," she groaned. "We're not gonna do this again, are we?"
"Do what?"
"Wrap my work up into a nice bundle, tie a bow around it, and then bash it into tiny little pieces!"
"I don't do that, do I?"
"Ye-e-es!"
"Oh, sorry. But that won't happen this time, because I agree completely with all your conclusions."
"Thanks!" Laura burst out, her reply dripping with sarcasm. It was the best way she knew to disguise how totally thrilled she felt.
It was a wonderful morning, and a smile lit Laura's face as she breathed the crisp air. They reached the top of the hill in silence and headed down the path through the thickening forest canopy.
"So… you were saying?" Laura fished.
"Okay," Gray began. "The mind creates a self out of nothing. If it can create one self, why can't it create two, or three, or fifteen. Your answer is that it does, only people normally call them 'moods.' You, however, call them personalities. You wake up in the morning with the grumpy personality. While in the shower, the optimistic personality seizes control of your mind. After a cup of coffee, the hardworking, euphoric personality takes over. When your boss falsely accuses you of screwing up, the angry, frustrated personality emerges. Each is present all the time, and they rise to the surface periodically — whenever the condition
s exist in which that particular personality flourishes. Everyone is a finite collection of varying personalities, each assuming dominance after a certain triggering event or as a result of some process of mental politicking."
The guardhouse up ahead came into view. Two men with rifles stood by the side of the road. The gate rose to let them pass, and the men saluted Gray with a tap of their brims.
"It's only in the case of multiple personality disorder," Gray continued, "that we see what's really happening. In the healthy mind, the different personalities are very much alike. They vary only in general outlook — in 'mood.' In multiple personality disorders, however, the personalities have hardly anything in common other than the same host. But there's nothing fundamentally different between the healthy mind and the mind stricken with MPD other than the degree of fragmentation among the personalities."
"I got laughed out of the auditorium when I delivered that paper," she said quietly.
"Of course you did." Laura looked up at Gray, and he smiled. "Whenever you try to change people's beliefs, you're in for a real fight. There's a reason we say old ideas die hard. It's because they have to die. And what kills them is a better idea. A more believable idea."
They jogged on for a while as Laura pondered his comment.
"Do you believe in God?" he asked all of a sudden.
Laura looked at him in surprise. "Where did that come from?"
"Some people hold faiths that transcend lower-order belief structures. Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, humanists, even atheists — all have core beliefs that define the universe in which their thoughts and ideas exist."
She had no idea what he'd just said. "Do you believe in God?" she asked.
"Yes."
She looked up at him again. His expression betrayed no hint of hidden meaning. "Well… what does that mean?"
"Does it surprise you that I believe in God?"
"No… I… It's just, I don't know."
"You didn't ask me which God." Gray took a deep breath. He gazed out through a break in the jungle at the blue sky and green sea far beyond. "Some people believe in a God who's angered by human attempts to build towers into the sky. Their God wants to keep man in his place — fearful, pious, awestruck, crawling at the feet of the master."
Their pace down the hill was now swift, but the cool air kept Laura fresh and full of energy. "What about your God?" she asked.
Gray smiled. "My God waits for us to build a ladder to his heaven. He gave us the ability and the drive, and he smiles with each rung that we climb. Good and evil are my God's measure of men, but what is good, and what is evil? Is God indifferent to the able-bodied or intelligent who waste the gifts he bestowed upon them? Is he indifferent to a man who, no matter how meager his talents, slaves and sweats his way to a better life?"
"Is that what it all comes down to? How hard somebody works? What about good deeds?"
"Good deeds are wonderful. They make our world a nicer place. They do not, however, address the central issue of our existence. They do not advance us as a people — a species."
"What is it about advancement that has risen to religious proportions to you? I mean, we live in a world that's filled with a million horrors brought about by the 'advances' of the last few centuries."
Gray laughed. "You should be dead by now. If your parents had managed to remain alive and fertile long enough to bear you, your mother would probably have died in childbirth. Any simple injury would have killed you as a child. If you had made it to adulthood, you would've been riddled with parasitic disease and suffered from tooth decay so painful as to have preferred death by starvation over another miserable meal. By our age, you would've been tired of life. Ignorant beyond belief, you would experience none of the more sublime pleasures we know. What little you enjoyed would've been physical and fleeting, and you would have lost even those things with the decline of your body. Laura, the only reason that doesn't describe your existence today is advancement, and the only reason we have advanced is work."
It was so trite — so obvious. Laura had expected more. She had expected something wonderful from a mind like Gray's. She tried not to let her disappointment show. "So, Joseph, when you build your tower to heaven, what then? How will your God greet you?"
Gray looked over at Laura and smiled. "As an equal, of course."
The road flattened and rounded an outcropping of rock to reveal a containment dome and two cooling towers. Laura stopped dead in her tracks.
"What the hell is that?" she demanded.
"It's a nuclear reactor."
Her jaw dropped. "Jesus Christ! Just… 'a nuclear reactor'? That's your answer?" Gray looked back and forth between Laura and the heavy concrete buildings, then nodded. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"
"Making electricity," he replied tentatively — as if uncertain how she would react next. "Wanna take a look inside?"
"No, I don't want to go inside there! You just don't get it, do you? You go around raising private armies and building nuclear power plants and God knows what, and you think there's nothing wrong with it because you're Joseph Gray!"
"Is it nuclear power? Are you opposed to that system of power generation?"
"Yes!" she replied, and then headed back up the hill at a jog.
Gray caught up with her. "Why?"
She opened her mouth to answer, but then the words hung in her throat. "Because! The danger. The waste. Everything!"
"Those are rather simple problems, really. Would you like me to explain how we handled them?"
"No!" Gray let the subject drop, and they continued up the hill in silence. Laura's thighs and lungs began to burn from the effort, but she was glad for the distraction of the pain. She regretted having lost her temper with Gray. After they passed the guardhouse. Laura said, "Look, I'm sorry, Joseph. But there's something going on here and you're not telling me what it is."
"I'm telling you what you need to know."
"How do you know what I need to know? You should tell people everything and let them decide what's important."
"I never tell anybody everything," Gray said in a voice so low it was almost as if he hadn't meant to say it. She looked up at him. He had concern etched deep on his face.
Laura's internal clock told her she had only until they reached the top of the hill to break through. She slackened her pace, and Gray slowed to remain beside her.
"Did you have any friends when you were a boy?" she asked.
Gray looked at her, and then to Laura's surprise he answered. "That depends on what you mean by friends. There were other kids around. Sometimes I'd play with them. But for the most part I preferred to read. I guess they thought I was pretty strange."
"What about your parents?"
"They died when I was twelve."
Laura felt a stab of pain at getting that answer. "I know, but I mean did you talk to them?"
"Sometimes. They didn't really know how to deal with me, especially my mother."
"What do you mean?"
He shrugged. "I always knew I was different. And my father knew it, too. But my mother… She just wanted me to be…" He frowned.
"Normal?"
Gray nodded. "My father would bring books home from work. When my mother would get ready for bed, he'd sneak them up to my room. I'd read them under the covers with a flashlight. I've never needed much sleep. For a long time I thought maybe that was all it was — that I had so much more time than other kids to read."
"Would your mother get upset with you?"
Gray sighed. "She loved me very, very much, but… When I played with the other kids instead of reading, she was happy. When I brought a B home from school, she'd tell me that was okay and bake cookies." He looked over at Laura with deeply sad eyes.
"When I figured that out I made a lot of Bs." His smile evoked still more sorrow from Laura. "But when I said something — like at a Christmas party once when I made a point to my parents' friends and everyone laughed because I was only a
child — she'd get upset."
"So you hid your intellect."
He looked at her. "What?"
"It happens a lot with gifted children. You hid your intellect — but not from your father."
His head dropped. "No, not from my father." Laura had made it through his shell. He was confiding in her.
She looked up and saw the top of the hill ahead — the opening leading out of their green-ceilinged tunnel. She was running out of time.
She began to hop on her right leg and grabbed the calf of her left. Gray reached out to support her. "I got a cramp!" she managed before drawing a long breath in a hiss through clenched teeth. Gray helped her sit on the grassy shoulder of the road. He knelt in front of her and began to massage her calf. She watched him — perhaps the most brilliant man on the earth — gently kneading her calf with a look of deep concentration. She let his hands smooth out the muscle with long, slow strokes.
Laura let a few seconds go by. She then resumed her work. "So your father accepted you for what you were?" Gray nodded, still rubbing her leg. "What happened when they died?"
He lowered his hands and looked away through a break in the jungle. "I was there, you know… when they died." A tide of anguish washed over Laura. She reached out — her hand hovering, unseen, just short of touching his shoulder.
She pulled it back. "Oh, Joseph, I'm…"
"I was in the backseat," he said, swallowing hard. "There were screeching tires and a loud boom." He winced, then shut his eyes tight. In his mind, she imagined, the scene was being replayed by a near-photographic memory. When his eyes opened, Gray looked tired.
"Everything turned over and over, then it was still." Gray cleared his throat, forcing himself on. "I couldn't find my way out because everything was upside down."
It was playing out in his head in real time, Laura realized. He was climbing through the wreckage — you could see the cords in his arms and legs flexing in a dreamlike replay of movements made decades ago.
"We were out on an empty stretch of highway," he said in a monotone. "It took half an hour for the first ambulance to reach us. My mother died while we waited. My father at the hospital that night."
Society of the Mind Page 24
