The Big U

by Neal Stephenson

  At the front of the auditorium, Professor Embers spoke. He never lectured; he spoke. In the middle of the auditorium his audience of five hundred sat back in their seats, staring up openmouthed into the image of the Professor on the nearest color TV monitor. In the back of the auditorium, Sarah sat in twilight, trying to balance the Student Government budget.

  “So grammar is just the mode in which we image concepts,” the professor was saying. “Grammar is like the walls and bumpers of a pinball machine. Rhetoric is like the flippers of a pinball machine. You control the flippers. The rest of the machine—grammar—controls everything else. If you use the flippers well, you make points. If you fail to image your concepts viably, your ball drops into the black hole of nothingness. If you try to cheat, the machine tilts and you lose—that’s like people not understanding your interactions. That’s why we have to learn Grammar here in Freshman. That, and because S. S. Krupp says we have to.”

  There was a pause of several seconds, and then a hundred or so people laughed. Sarah did not. Unlike the freshmen in the class, who thought Professor Embers was a cool guy, Sarah thought he was a bore and a turkey. He continued to speak, and she continued to balance.

  This was the budget for this semester, and it was supposed to have been done last semester. But last semester the records had been gulped by a mysterious computer error, and now Sarah had to reconstruct them so that the government could resume debate. She had some help from me in this, though I don’t know how much good it did. We had met early in the year, at a reception for faculty-in-residence, and later had a lunch or two together and talked about American Megaversity. If nothing else, my suite was a quiet and pleasant enough place where she could spread her papers out and work uninterrupted when she needed to.

  She could also work uninterrupted in her Freshman English class, because she was a senior English major with a 3.7 average and didn’t need to pay much attention.

  Her first inkling that something was wrong had been in midsummer, when the megaversity’s computer scheduling system had scheduled her for Freshman English automatically, warning that she had failed to meet this requirement during her first year.

  “Look,” she had said to the relevant official when she arrived in the fall, “I’m an English major. I know this stuff. Why are you putting me in Freshman English?”

  The General Curriculum Advisor consulted little codes printed by the computer, and looked them up in a huge computer-printed book. “Ah,” he said, “was one of your parents a foreign national?”

  “My stepmother is from Wales.”

  “That explains it. You see.” The official had swung around toward her and assumed a frank, open body-language posture. “Statistical analysis shows that children of one or more foreign nationals are often gifted with Special Challenges.”

  Sarah’s spine arched back and she set her jaw. “You’re saying I can’t speak English because my stepmother was Welsh?”

  “Special Challenges are likely in your case. You were mistakenly exempted from Freshmen English because of your high test scores. This exemption option has now been retroactively waived for your convenience.”

  “I don’t want it waived. It’s not convenient.”

  “To ensure maintenance of high academic standards, the waiver is avolitional.”

  “Well, that’s bullshit.” This was not a very effective thing to say. Sarah wished that Hyacinth could come talk for her; Hyacinth would not be polite, Hyacinth would say completely outrageous things and they would scatter in terror. “There’s no way I can accept that.” Drawn to the noise like scavengers, two young clean-cut advisors looked in the door with open and understanding smiles. Everyone smiled except for Sarah. But she knew she was right this time—she knew damn well what language was spoken in Wales these days. They could smile stupidly until blue in the face. When the advisor hinted that she was asking for special treatment because she was President, she gave him a look that snapped his composure for a second, a small but helpful triumph.

  She had done it by the books, filing a petition requesting to be discharged from Freshman English. But her petition was rejected because of a computer error which made it appear that she had gotten 260 instead of 660 on her SATs. By the time an extra score report from the testing company proved that she was smart after all, it was too late to drop or add classes—so, Freshman English it was.

  The end of the class approached at last, and Professor Embers handed back this week’s essays. The assignment was to select a magazine ad and write about how it made you feel.

  “I’ve been epiphanied by the quality of your essays this week,” said Professor Embers. “We hardly had to give out any C’s this time around. I have them alphabetized by your first names up here in sixteen stacks, one for each section.”

  All five hundred students went down at once to get theirs. Sarah worked for ten minutes, then gathered her things and headed for the front, dawdling on purpose. Clustered around the stack of papers for her section she could see five of the Stalinists—for some reason they had all ended up in her section. Since she never attended section meetings, this was no problem, but she did not want to encounter them at times like this either. Standing there tall and straight as a burned-out sapling in a field was Dexter Fresser, an important figure in the Stalinist Underground Battalion. Most of all, she wanted to avoid him. Sarah and Dex had gone to the same high school in Ohio, ridden the same bus to school, slept in the same bed thirteen times and shared the same LSD on three occasions. Since then, Dex had hardly ever not taken lots of acid. Sarah had taken none. Now he was a weird rattle-minded radical who nevertheless remembered her, and she avoided him scrupulously.

  About halfway down the aisle she found a television monitor displaying an image of Dex. She sank deeply into a seat and watched him and his comrades. Dex was reading a paper desultorily and she knew it was hers. He flipped aimlessly through it, as though searching for a particular word or phrase, then shook his head helplessly and dropped it back on the stack. Finally the last of them excavated his paper and they were collectively gone, leaving behind several dozen essays no one had bothered to pick up.

  Associate Professor Archibald Embers, Learning Facilitator of Freshman English G Group, was regarding a young woman on his sofa and endeavoring to keep his pipe lit. This required a lot of upside-down work with his butane lighter and he thought the burn on his thumb might be second-degree. This particular woman was definitely confrontational, though, and it was no time to show pain. He held the pipe cautiously and reached out with the other hand to drape his thumb casually over the rim of a potted plant, thrusting the roasted region deeply into the cool humus. I am Antaeus, he thought, and yet I am Prometheus, singed by my own flame. They were sitting in the conversation pit he had installed so as to avoid talking to students across his desk like some kind of authoritarian. Or was it totalitarian? He could never remember the distinction.

  This woman was clearly high voltage, Type A, low-alpha and left-hemisphere, with very weird resonances. Seeing her through to the end of her crisis would be painful. She had ripped off a lot of papers from the auditorium and had brought them here into his space to fine-tooth comb them. She had a problem with her grade, a B.

  “Now,” she continued, whipping over another page, “let’s look at page two of this one, which is about an advertisement for Glans Essence Cologne. ‘The point of this is about these foxes. He has a bunch. On him. He a secret agent, like Bond James Bond or something. Or some other person with lots of foxes. Why he has foxes? Is Glans Essence Cologne. They hope you figuring that out, will buy some of it. Which is what they are selling.’ Now, next to that in the margin you wrote, ‘Excellent analysis of the working of the ad.’ Then at the end you wrote, ‘Your understanding of how the System brainwashes us is why I gave you an A on this paper.’ Now really, if you want to give him an A for that it’s up to you, but how can you then give me a B? Mine was three times as long, I had an introduction, conclusion, an outline, no grammatical
errors, no misspelled words—what do you expect?”

  “This is a very good question,” said Embers. He took a long draw on his pipe. “What is a grade? That is the question.” He chuckled, but she apparently didn’t get it. “Some teachers grade on curves. You have to be a math major to understand your grade! But forget those fake excuses. A grade is actually a form of poetry. It is a subjective reaction to a learner’s work, distilled and reduced down to its purest essence—not a sonnet, not a haiku, but a single letter. That’s remarkable, isn’t it?”

  “Look, that’s just groovy. But you have to grade in such a way that I’m shown to be a better writer than he is. Otherwise it’s unfair and unrealistic.”

  Embers recrossed his legs and spent a while sucking his pipe back into a blaze. His learner picked up a paper and fanned smoke away from her face. “Mind if I smoke?” he said.

  “Your office,” she said in a strangled voice.

  Fine, if she didn’t want to assert herself. He finally decided on the best approach. “You aren’t necessarily a better writer. You called some of them functional illiterates. Well those illiterates, as you called them, happen to have very expressive prose voices. Remember that in each person’s own dialect he or she is perfectly literate. So in the sense of having escaped orthodoxy to be truly creative, they are highly advanced wordsmiths, while you are still struggling to break free of grammatical rules systems. They express themselves to me and I react with little one-letter poems of my own—the essence of grading! Poetry! And being a poet I’m particularly well suited for it. Your idea of tearing down these proto-artists because they aren’t just like you smacks of a kind of absolutism which is very disturbing in a temple of academic freedom.”

  They sat there silent for a while.

  “You really said that, didn’t you?” she finally asked.

  “I did.”

  “Huh. So we’re just floating around without any standards at all.”

  “You could put it that way. You should interact with the department chairman on this. Look, there is no absolute reality, right? We can’t force everyone to express themselves through the same absolute rules.”

  When the young woman left she seemed curiously drained and quiet. Indeed, absorbing new world-views could be a sobering experience. Embers found a blister on his thumb, and was inspired to write a haiku.

  There came the sound of a massive ring of keys being slapped against the outside of Casimir Radon’s door. He looked up from the papers on his desk, and in his lap Spike the illicit kitten followed suit, scrambling to red-alert status and scything sixteen claws into his thigh. Before Casimir had opened his mouth to say “Who is it” or Spike could spring forward to engage the foe, the door was unlocked and thrown open. A short, heavy man with a disconcerting resemblance to Leonid Brezhnev stepped into the room.

  “Stermnator,” he mumbled, rolling the r’s on his tongue like Black Sea caviar. Casimir covered Spike with his hand, hoping to prevent detection, and the kitten grasped a finger between its forepaws and began to rasp with its tongue.

  Behind the B-man was a small wiry old guy with chloracne, who bore a metal canister with a pump on top and a tube leading to a nozzle in his hand. Before Casimir could even grunt in response, this man had stepped crisply into the room and begun to apply a heavy mist to the baseboards. The B-man glowered darkly at Casimir, who sat in silence and watched as the exterminator walked around the room, nozzle to wall, spraying everything near the baseboards, including shoes, Spike’s food and water dishes, a typewriter, two unmatched socks, a book and a calculator charger. Both the strangers looked around the inside of his nearly barren room with faint expressions of incomprehension or disdain.

  By the time Casimir got around to saying, “That’s okay, I haven’t seen any bugs in here since I moved in,” the sprayer was bearing down on him inexorably. Casimir pushed the kitten up against his stomach, grasped the hem of his extra long seven-year-old Wall Drug T-shirt, and pulled it up to form a little sling for the struggling creature, crossing his arms over the resulting bulge in an effort to hold and conceal. At the same time he stood and scampered out of the path of the exterminator, who bumped into him and knocked him off balance onto the bed, arms still crossed. He bounced back up, weaved past the exterminator, and stood with his back to the door, staring nonchalantly out the window at the view of E Tower outside. Behind him, the exterminator paused near the exit to soak the straps of an empty duffel bag. As Casimir watched the reflection of the two men closing the door he was conscious of a revolting chemical odor. Immediately he whirled and tossed Spike onto the bed, then took his food and water dishes out to wash them in the bathroom.

  Casimir had seen his first illicit kitten on the floor above his, when he had forgotten to push his elevator button. He got off on the floor above to take the stairs down one flight, and saw some students playing with the animal in the hallway. After some careful inquiries he made contact with a kitten pusher over the phone. Two weeks later Casimir, his directions memorized, went to the Library at 4:15 in the morning. He proceeded to the third floor and pulled down the January–March 1954 volume of the Soviet Asphalt Journal and placed two twenty-dollar bills inside the cover. He then went to the serials desk, where he was waited on by a small, dapper librarian in his forties.

  “I would like to report,” he said, opening the volume, “that pages 1738 through 1752 of this volume have been razored out, and they are exactly the pages I need.”

  “I see,” the man said sympathetically.

  “And while I’m here, I have some microfilms to pick up, which I got on interlibrary loan.”

  “Ah, yes, I know the ones you’re talking about. Just a moment, please.” The librarian disappeared into a back office and emerged a minute later with a large box filled with microfilm reel boxes. Casimir picked it up, finding it curiously light, smiled at the librarian and departed. A pass had already been made out for him, and the exit guard waved him through. Back in his room, he pulled out the top layer of microfilm boxes to find, curled up on a towel, a kitten recovering from a mild tranquilizer.

  Since then Spike had been neither mild nor tranquil, but that at least provided Casimir with some of the unpredictability that Plex life so badly lacked. He almost didn’t mind having a kitten run around the obstacle course of his room at high speed for hours at a time in the middle of the night, because it gave his senses something not utterly flat to perceive. Even though Spike tried to sleep on his face, and hid all small important articles in odd places, Casimir was charmed.

  He pulled on his glacier glasses in a practiced motion and stepped out into the hall. Casimir’s wing was only two floors away from allies of the Wild and Crazy Guys, best partiers in the Plex, and two Saturdays ago they had come down with their spray paint and painted giant red, white and blue twelve-spoked wheels between each pair of doors. These were crude representations of the Big Wheel, a huge neon sign outside the Plex, which the Wild and Crazy Guys pretended to worship as a joke and initiation ritual. This year they had become aggressive graffitists, painting Big Wheels almost everywhere in the Plex. Casimir, used to it, walked down this gallery of giant wheels to the bathroom, Spike’s dishes in hand.

  The bathrooms in the wings looked on the inside like microwave ovens or autoclaves, with glossy green tile on the walls, brilliant lighting, overwaxed floors and so much steam that entering one was like entering a hallucination. At one end of the bathroom, three men and their girlfriends were taking showers, drinking, shouting a lot and generally being Wild and Crazy. They were less than coherent, but most of what Casimir could make out dealt with Anglo-Saxon anatomical terms and variations on “what do you think of this” followed by prolonged yelling from the partner. Casimir was tempted to stay and listen, but reasoned that since he was still a virgin anyway there was no point in trying to learn anything advanced, especially by eavesdropping. He went down the line of closely spaced sinks until he found one that had not been stuffed with toilet paper or backed up with
drain crud.

  As he was washing Spike’s dishes, a guy came in the door with a towel around his waist. He looked conventional, though somewhat blocky, athletic and hairless. He came up and stood very close to Casimir, staring at him wordlessly for a long time as though nearsighted; Casimir ignored him, but glanced at him from time to time in the mirror, looking between two spokes of a Big Wheel that had been drawn on it with shaving cream.

  After a while, he tugged on Casimir’s sleeve. “Hey,” he mumbled, “can I borrow your”

  Casimir said nothing.

  “Huh?” said the strange guy.

  “I don’t know,” said Casimir. “Depends on what you want. Probably not.”

  A grin gradually sprouted on the man’s face and he turned around as though smirking with imaginary friends behind him. “Oh, Jeez,” he said, and turned away. “I hate fuckers like you!” he yelled, and ran to the lockers across from the sinks, running a few steps up the wall before sprawling back down on the floor again. Casimir watched him in the mirror as he went from locker to locker, finally finding an unlocked one. The strange guy pawed through it and selected a can of shaving cream. “Hey,” he said, and looked at the back of Casimir’s head. “Hey, Wall.”

  Casimir looked at him in the mirror. “What is it?”

  The strange guy did not understand that Casimir was looking right at him. “Hey fucker! Cocksucker! Mr. Drug! You!” Rhythmic female shrieking began to emanate from a shower stall.

  “What is it,” Casimir yelled back, refusing to turn.

  The strange guy approached him and Casimir turned half around defensively. He stood very close to Casimir. “Your hearing isn’t very good,” he shouted, “you should take off your glasses.”

  “Do you want something? If so, you should just tell me.”

  “Do you think he’d mind if I used this?”

  “Who?”

  The strange guy smirked and shook his head. “Do you know anything about terriers?”