The Big U

by Neal Stephenson

  “So I move we cut SUB funding to the bare minimum, say, twenty bucks per capita, and give Neutrino its full request for a scientific research project, $1500.00.”

  The rest of the evening, anyway, was bonkers, and I’ll not go into detail. It was insignificant anyway, since the administration had the final say; the Student Government would have to keep passing budgets until they passed one that S. S. Krupp would sign, and the only question was how long it would take them to knuckle under. Time was against the SUB. As the members of the government got more bored, they became more interested in passing a budget that would go through the first time around. Eventually it became obvious that the SUB had lost out, and the only thing wanting was the final vote. The highlight of the evening came just before that vote: the speech of Yllas Freedperson.

  Yllas, the very substantial and brilliant leader of the SUB, was a heavy black woman in her early thirties, in her fifth year of study at the Modern Political Art Workshop. She had a knack for turning out woodblock prints portraying anguished faces, burning tenements, and thick tortured hands reaching for the sky. Even her pottery was inspired by the work of wretched Central American peasants. She was also editor and illustrator of the People’s Truth Publication, but her real talent was for public speaking, where she had the power of a gospel preacher and the fire of a revolutionary. She waited dignified for the TV lights, then launched into a speech that lasted at least a quarter of an hour. At just the right times she moaned, she chanted, she sang, she reasoned, she whispered, she bellowed, she just plain spoke in a fluid and hypnotically rhythmic voice. She talked about S. S. Krupp and the evil of the System, how the System turned good into bad, how this society was just like the one that caused the Holocaust, which was no excuse for Israel, about conservatism in Washington and how our environment, economic security, personal freedom, and safety from nuclear war were all threatened by the greedy action of cutting the SUB’s budget. Finally out came the names of Martin Luther King, Jr., Marx, Gandhi, Che, Jesus Christ, Ronald Reagan, Hitler, S. S. Krupp, the KKK, Bob Avakian, Elijah Mohammed and Abraham Lincoln. Through it all, the bat was active, dipping and diving crazily through the auditorium, dive-bombing toward walls or lights or people but veering away at the last moment, flitting through the dense network of beams and cables and catwalks and light fixtures and hanging speakers and exposed pipes above us at great smooth speed, tracing a marvelously complicated path that never brushed against any solid object. All of it was absorbing and breathtaking, and when Yllas Freedperson was finished and the bat, perhaps no longer attracted by her voice, slipped up and disappeared into a corner, there was a long silence before the applause broke out.

  “Thank you, Yllas,” said Sarah respectfully. “Is there any particular motion you wanted to make or did you just want to inject your comments?”

  “I move,” shouted Yllas Freedperson, “that we put the budget the way it was.”

  The vote was close. The SUB lost. Recounting was no help. They took the dignified approach, forming into a sad line behind Yllas and singing “We Shall Overcome” in slow tones as they marched out. Above their heads they carried their big black-on-red posters of S. S. Krupp with a target drawn over his face, and they marched so slowly that it took two repetitions of the song before they made it out into the hallway to distribute leaflets and posters.

  Sarah, three members of her cabinet and I gathered later in my suite for wine. After the frenzy of the meeting we were torpid, and hardly said anything for the first fifteen minutes or so. Then, as it commonly did those days, the conversation came around to the Terrorists.

  “What’s the story on those Terrorist guys?” asked Willy, a business major who acted as Treasurer. “Are they genuine Terrorists?”

  “Not on my floor,” said Sarah, “since they subjugated us. We’re living in…the Pax Thirteenica.”

  “I’ve heard a number of stories,” I said. Everyone looked at me and I shifted into my professor mode and lit my pipe. “Their major activity is the toll booth concept. They station Terrorists in the E13 elevator lobby who continually push the up and down buttons so that every passing elevator stops and opens automatically. If it doesn’t contain any non-students or dangerous-looking people, they hold the door open until everyone gives them a quarter. They have also claimed a section of the Cafeteria, and there have been fights over it. But nothing I’d call true terrorism.”

  “How about gang rape?” asked Hillary, the Secretary, quietly. Everything got quiet and we looked at her.

  “It’s just a rumor,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong. It hasn’t happened to me. The word is that a few of the hardcore Terrorists do it, kind of as an initiation. They go to big parties, or throw their own. You know how at a big party there are always a few women—typical freshmen—who get very drunk. Some nice-looking Terrorist approaches the woman—I hear that they’re very good at identifying likely candidates—and gets into her confidence and invites her to another party. When they get to the other party, she turns out to be the only woman there, and you can imagine the rest. But the really terrible thing is that they go through her things and find out where she lives and who she is, then keep coming back whenever they feel like it. They have these women so scared and broken that they don’t resist. Supposedly the Terrorists have kind of an invisible harem, a few terrified women all over the Plex, too dumb or scared to say anything.”

  I was sitting there with my eyes closed, like everyone else a little queasy. “I’ve heard of the same thing elsewhere,” I said.

  “I wonder if it’s happened to any Airheads,” murmured Sarah. “God, I’ll bet it has. I wonder if any of them know about it. I wonder if they even understand what is being done to them—some of them probably don’t even understand they have a right to be angry.”

  “How could anyone not understand rape?” said Hillary.

  “You don’t know how mixed up these women are. You don’t know what they did to me, without even understanding why I didn’t like it. You can’t imagine those people—they have no place to stand, no ideas of their own—if one is raped, and not one of her friends understands, where is she? She’s cut loose, the Terrorists can tell her anything and make her into whatever they want. Shit, where are those animals going to stop? We’re having a big costume party with them in December.”

  “There’s a party to avoid,” said Hillary.

  “It’s called Fantasy Island Nite. They’ve been planning it for months. But by the time the semester is over, those guys will be running wild.”

  “They’ve been running wild for a long time, it sounds like,” said Willy. “You’d better get used to that, you know? I think you’re living in the law of the jungle.” That sounded a trifle melodramatic, but none of us could find a way to disagree.

  Sarah and Casimir met in the Megapub, a vast pale airship hangar littered with uncertain plastic tables and chairs made of steel rods bent around into uncomfortable chairlike shapes that stabbed their occupants beneath the shoulder blades. At one end was a long bar, at the other a serving bay connected into the central kitchen complex. Casimir declined to eat Megapub food and lunched on a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich made from overpriced materials bought at the convenience store and a plastic cup of excessively carbonated beer. Sarah used the salad bar. They removed several trays from a window table and stacked them atop a nearby wastebasket, then sat down.

  “Thanks for coming on short notice,” said Sarah. “I need all the help I can get in selling this budget to Krupp, and your statistics might impress him.”

  Casimir, chewing vigorously on a big bite of generic white bread and generic chunkless peanut butter, drew a few computer-printed graphs from his backpack. “These are called Lorentz curves,” he mumbled, “and they show equality of distribution. Perfect equality is this line here, at a forty-five degree angle. Anything less than equal comes out as a curve beneath the equality line. This is what we had with the old budget.” He displayed a graph showing a deeply sagging curve, with the e
quality line above it for comparison. The graph had been produced by a computer terminal which had printed letters at various spots on the page, demonstrating in crude dotted-line fashion the curves and lines. “Now, here’s the same analysis on our new budget.” The new graph had a curve that nearly followed the equality line. “Each graph has a coefficient called the Gini coefficient, the ratio of the area between the line and curve to the area under the line. For perfect equality the Gini coefficient is zero. For the old budget it was very bad, about point eight, and for the new budget it is more like point two, which is pretty good.”

  Sarah listened politely. “You have a computer program that does this?”

  “Yeah. Well, I do now, anyway. I just wrote it up.”

  “It’s working okay?”

  Casimir peered at her oddly, then at the graphs, then back at her. “I think so. Why?”

  “Well, look at these letters in the curves.” She pulled one of the graphs over and traced out the letters indicating the Lorentz curve: FELLATIOBUGGERYNECROPHILIACUNNILINGUSANALINGUSBESTIALITY…

  “Oh,” Casimir said quietly. The other curve read: CUNTLICKSHITPISSCOCKASSHOLETITGIVEMEANENEMABEATMELICKMEOWNME…Casimir’s face waxed red and his tongue was protruding slightly. “I didn’t do this. These are supposed to say, ‘a new budget’ and ‘old budget.’ I didn’t write this into the program. Uh, this is what we call a bug. They happen from time to time. Oh, Jeez, I’m really sorry.” He covered his face with one hand and grabbed the graphs and crumpled them into his bag.

  “I believe you,” she said. “I don’t know much about computers, but I know there have been problems with this one.”

  About halfway through his treatise on Lorentz curves it had occurred to Casimir that he was in the process of putting his foot deeply into his mouth. She was an English major; he had looked her up in the student directory to find out; what the hell did she care about Gini coefficients? Sarah was still smiling, so if she was bored she at least respected him enough not to let it show. He had told her that he’d just now written this program up, and that was bad, because it looked—oy! It looked as though he were trying to impress her, a sophisticated Humanities type, by writing computer programs on her behalf as though that were the closest he could come to real communication. And then obscene Lorentz curves!

  He was saved by her ignorance of computers. The fact was, of course, that there was no way a computer error could do that—if she had ever run a computer program, she would have concluded that Casimir had done it on purpose. Suddenly he remembered his conversation with Virgil. The Worm! It must have been the Worm. He was about to tell her, to absolve himself, when he remembered it was a secret he was honor bound to protect.

  He had to be honest. Could it be that he had actually written this just to impress her? Anything printed on a computer looked convincing. If that had been his motive, this served him right. Now was the time to say something witty, but he was no good at all with words—a fact he didn’t doubt was more than obvious to her. She probably knew every smart, interesting man in the university, which meant he might as well forget about making any headway toward looking like anything other than an unkempt, poor, math-and-computer-obsessed nerd whose idea of intelligent conversation was to show off the morning’s computer escapades.

  “You didn’t have to go to the trouble of writing a program.”

  “Ha! Well, no trouble. Easier to have the machine do it than work it out by hand. Once you get good on the computer, that is.” He bit his lip and looked out the window. “Which isn’t to say I think I’m some kind of great programmer. I mean, I am, but that’s not how I think of myself.”

  “You aren’t a hacker,” she suggested.

  “Yeah! Exactly.” Everyone knew the term “hacker,” so why hadn’t he just said it?

  She looked at him carefully. “Didn’t we meet somewhere before? I could swear I recognize you from somewhere.”

  He had been hoping that she had forgotten, or that she would not recognize him through his glacier glasses. That first day, yes, he had read her computer card for her—a hacker’s idea of a perfect introduction!

  “Yeah. Remember Mrs. Santucci? That first day?” She nodded her head with a little smile; she remembered it all, for better or worse. He watched her intensely, trying to judge her reaction.

  “Yes,” she said, “sure. I guess I never properly thanked you for that, so—thank you.” She held out her hand. Casimir stared at it, then put out his hand and shook it. He gripped her firmly—a habit from his business, where a crushing handshake was a sign of trustworthiness. To her he had probably felt like an orangutan trying to dislocate her shoulder. Besides which, some apple-blackberry jam had dripped out onto the first joint of his right index finger some minutes ago, and he had thoughtlessly sucked on it.

  She was awfully nice. That was a dumb word, “nice,” but he couldn’t come up with anything better. She was bright, friendly and understanding, and kind to him, which was good of her considering his starved fanatical appearance and general fabulous ugliness. He hoped that this conversation would soon end and that they would come out of it with a wonderful relationship. Ha.

  No one said anything; she was just watching him. Obviously she was! It was his turn to say something! How long had he been sitting there staring into the navy-blue maw of his mini-pie?

  “What’s your major?” they said simultaneously. She laughed immediately, and belatedly he laughed also, though his laugh was sort of a gasp and sob that made him sound as if he were undergoing explosive decompression. Still, it relaxed him slightly.

  “Oh,” she added, “I’m sorry. I forgot Neutrino was for physics majors.”

  “Don’t be sorry.” She was sorry?

  “I’m an English major.”

  “Oh.” Casimir reddened. “I guess you probably noticed that English isn’t my strong point.”

  “Oh, I disagree. When you were speaking last night, once you got rolling you did very well. Same goes for today, when you were describing your curves. A lot of the better scientists have an excellent command of language. Clear thought leads to clear speech.”

  Casimir’s pulse went up to about twice the norm and he felt warmth in the lower regions. He gazed into the depths of his half-drained beer, not knowing what to say for fear of being ungrammatical. “I’ve only been here a few weeks, but I’ve heard that S. S. Krupp is quite the speaker. Is that so?”

  Sarah smiled and rolled her eyes. At first Casimir had considered her just a typically nice-looking young woman, but at this instant it became obvious that he had been wrong; in fact she was spellbindingly lovely. He tried not to stare, and shoved the last three bites of pie into his mouth. As he chewed he tried to track what she was saying so that he wouldn’t lose the thread of the conversation and end up looking like an absent-minded hacker with no ability to relate to anyone who wasn’t destined to become a machine-language expert.

  “He is quite a speaker,” she said. “If you’re ever on the opposite side of a question from S. S. Krupp, you can be sure he’ll bring you around sooner or later. He can give you an excellent reason for everything he does that goes right back to his basic philosophy. It’s awesome, I think.”

  At last he was done stuffing junk food into his unshaven face. “But when he out-argues you—is that a word?”

  “We’ll let it slip by.”

  “When he does that, do you really agree, or do you think he’s just outclassed you?”

  “I’ve thought about that quite a bit. I don’t know.” She sat back pensively, was stabbed by her chair, and sat back up. “What am I saying? I’m an English major!” Casimir chuckled, not quite following this. “If he can justify it through a fair argument, and no one else can poke any holes in it, I can’t very well disagree, can I? I mean, you have to have some kind of anchors for your beliefs, and if you don’t trust clear, correct language, how do you know what to believe?”

  “What about intuition?” asked Casimir, surprising himself. “You know
the great discoveries of physics weren’t made through argument. They were made in flashes of intuition, and the explanations and proofs thought up afterward.”

  “Okay.” She drained her coffee and thought about it. “But those scientists still had to come up with verbal proofs to convince themselves that the discoveries were real.”

  So far, Casimir thought, she seemed more interested than peeved, so he continued to disagree. “Well, scientists don’t need language to tell them what’s real. Mathematics is the ultimate reality. That’s all the anchor we need.”

  “That’s interesting, but you can’t use math to solve political problems—it’s not useful in the real world.”

  “Neither is language. You have to use intuition. You have to use the right side of your brain.”

  She looked again at the clock. “I have to go now and get ready for Krupp.” Now she was looking at him—appraisingly he thought. She was going to leave! He desperately wanted to ask her out. But too many women had burst out laughing, and he couldn’t take that. Yet there she sat, propped up on her elbows—was she waiting for him to ask? Impossible.

  “Uh,” he said, but at the same time she said, “Let’s get together some other time. Would you like that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fine!” With a little negotiation, they arranged to meet in the Megapub on Friday night.

  “I can’t believe you’re free Friday night!” he blurted, and she looked at him oddly. She stood up and held out her hand again. Casimir scrambled up and shook it gently.

  “See you later,” she said, and left. Casimir remained standing, watched her all the way across the shiny floor of the Megapub, then telescoped into his seat and nearly blacked out.

  She did not have to wait long amid the marble-and-mahogany splendor of Septimius Severus Krupp’s anteroom. She would have been happy to wait there for days, especially if she could have brought some favorite music and maybe Hyacinth, taken off her shoes, lounged on the sofa and stared out the window over the lush row of healthy plants. The administrative bloc of the Plex was an anomaly, like a Victorian mansion airlifted from London and dropped whole into a niche beneath C Tower. Here was none of the spare geometry of the rest of the Plex, none of the anonymous monochromatic walls and bald rectangles and squares that seemed to drive the occupants bonkers. No plastic showed; the floors were wooden, the windows opened, the walls were paneled and the honest wood and intricate parquet floors gave the place something of nature’s warmth and diversity. In the past month Sarah had seen almost no wood—even the pencils in the stores here were of blond plastic—and she stared dumbly at the paneling everywhere she went, as though the detailed grain was there for a reason and bore careful examination. All of this was an attempt to invest American Megaversity with the aged respectability of a real university; but she felt at home here.