The Big U

by Neal Stephenson

  Shit! One of Krupp’s CIA men had seen him! One of the Frosted Mini-Wheat types with the three-piece suits who ran Krupp’s tape-recorder during speeches. No time to wait; the stun grenade might be lobbed at any moment.

  To us he looked like a strange dexed-out bird, not running across the front of the hall so much as vibrating across at low frequency. He was tall, skinny, pale and wore an old T-shirt; he never seemed to plant any part of his nervous body firmly on the ground. He entered, bouncing off a doorjamb and losing his balance. He then caromed off a seat near a CIA man, who had not yet reacted, hopped three times to regain balance and, gaining some direction, scrambled toward S. S. Krupp, chased all the way by four bats driven into a frenzy by the aroma of the banana-cream pie.

  “This means that the current vulgar usage of the word ‘autonomous’ to mean independent, i.e., free of external influence, sovereign, is not entirely correct,” said Krupp, who glanced up from his notes to see what everybody was gasping at. “To be autonomous, as we can readily see by examining the Greek roots of the word—autos meaning self and nomos meaning law”—here he paused for a moment and ducked. The pie flew sideways over his head and exploded on the blackboard behind him. He straightened back up—“is to be self-ruling, to exercise a respect for the Law”—Operative 3 tottered out the door as the SUB groaned—“which in this case means not the law of a society or political system but rather the Law imposed by a rational man on his own actions.” Outside in the hallway there was scuffling, and Krupp paused. With much grunting and swearing, Operative 3, sans ski mask, was dragged back into the room by three clean-cut students in pastel sweaters, accompanied by an older, smiling man in a plaid flannel shirt.

  “Here’s your man, President Krupp, sir,” said an earnest young Anglo-Saxon, brushing a strand of hair from his brow with his free hand. “We’ve placed this Communist under citizen’s arrest. Shall we contact the authorities on your behalf?” Their mentor beamed even more broadly at this suggestion, his horsey, protruding bicuspids glaring like great white grain elevators on the Dakota plain.

  Krupp regarded them warily, walking around to the other side of the lectern as though it were a shield. Then he turned to the audience. “Excuse me, please. Guess I’m the highest authority here, so just let me clear this up.” He looked back at the group by the doorway, who watched respectfully, except for Operative 3, who shouted from his headlock: “See, man? This is what happens when you try to change the System!” Several SUBbies began to come to his aid, but were halted by Krupp’s aides.

  “Who the hell are you?” said Krupp. “Are you from that squalid North Dakotan cult thing?”

  They were shocked, even Operative 3, and stared uncomprehendingly. Deep concern showed in the lined, earnest face of the man in the plaid flannel. Finally he stepped forward. “Yessirree. We are indeed followers of the Temple of Unlimited Godhead, and proud of it too. With all due respect, just what do you mean by ‘squalid’?”

  “It’s like a dead dog in the sitting room, son. Look, why don’t you all just let that boy go? That’s right.”

  Regretfully, they released him. Operative 3 stood up, shivering violently. He could not exactly thank Krupp. After hopping from foot to foot he spun and continued his flight down the hall as though nothing had happened.

  “Look,” Krupp continued. “We’ve got a security force here. We’ve got organized religions that have been doing just fine for millennia. Now what we don’t need is a brainwashing franchise, or any of your Kool-Aid–stoned outlaw Mormon Jesuits. I know times are hard in North Dakota but they’re hard everywhere and it doesn’t call for new religions. Of course, you have some very fine points on the subject of Communism. Now, this does not mean we will in any way fail to extend you full religious and political freedoms as with the old-fashioned nonprofit religions.”

  The SUB hooted at Krupp’s wicked intolerance for religious diversity while the rest of the audience applauded. The TUGgies were galvanized, and spoke up for their renegade sect as eloquently as they knew how.

  “But that man was a Communist! We found his card.”

  “Look at it this way. If TUG brainwashes people, how do you explain the great diversity of our membership, which comes from towns and farms of all sizes all over the Dakotas and Saskatchewan?”

  “TUG is fully consistent with Judeo-Christo-Mohammedan-Bahaism.”

  Communism is the greatest threat in the world today.

  “The goals of Messiah Jorgenson Five are fully consistent with the aims of American higher education.”

  “Our church is noncoercive. We believe of our own free, uh, pamphlet…explains our ideas in layman’s language.”

  “Visit North Dakota this summer for fun in the sun. Temple Camp.”

  “Who is the brainwasher, our church, which teaches that we may all be Messiah/Buddhas together, or today’s media society with its constant emphasis on materialism?”

  “If you’ll accept this free book it will reveal truths you may never have thought about before.”

  “I couldn’t help noticing that you were looking a little down and out, kinda lonely. You know, sometimes it helps to talk to a stranger.”

  “Do you need a free dinner?”

  Krupp watched skeptically. The older man was silent, but finally touched each student lightly on the shoulder, silencing one and all. They left, smiling.

  Looking disgusted, Krupp returned to the microphone. “Where was I, talking about autonomy?”

  He surveyed his notes and concluded his lecture in another twenty minutes. He paused then to light his cigar, which he had been fingering, twiddling, stroking and sniffing exquisitely for several minutes, and was answered by exaggerated coughing from the SUB section. “I’m free to answer some questions,” he announced, surveying the room and squinting into his cigar smoke like a cowboy into the setting sun.

  Nearly everyone in the SUB raised his/her hand, but Yllas Freedperson, Operatives 1 and 2 and two others arose and made their loud way up to the back of the hall for an emergency conference. They were deeply concerned; they stopped short of being openly suspicious, a deeply fascist trait, but it occurred to them that what had just happened might strongly suggest the presence of a TUG deep-cover mole in the SUB!

  Meanwhile, question time went on down below. As was his custom, Krupp called on two people with serious questions before resorting to the SUB. Eventually he did so, looking carefully through that section and stabbing his finger at its middle.

  By SUB custom, any call for a question was communal property and was distributed by consensus to a member of the group. This time, Dexter Fresser, Sarah’s hometown exbeau, number 2 person in the SUB and its chief political theorist, got the nod. Shaking his head, he pushed himself up in his seat until he could see Krupp’s face hovering malevolently above the dome of the next person’s bandanna. He took a deep breath, preparing for intellectual combat, and began.

  “You were talking about autonomy. Well, then you were talking about Greek words of roots. I want to talk about Greek too because we have our roots in Greece, just like, you know, our words do—that is, most of us do, our culture does, even if our ethnicity doesn’t. But Rome was much, much more powerful than Greece, and that was after most of the history of the human race, which we don’t know anything about. And you know in Greece they had gayness all over the place. I’m saying that nice and loud even though you hate it, but even though, uh, you know, fascist? But you can’t keep me from saying it. Did you ever think about the concentration camps? How all those people were killed by fascists? And also in Haiti, which we annexed in 1904. And did you ever think about the socialist revolution in France that was crushed by D-Day because the socialists were fighting off the Nazis single-handedly. Where’s the good in that? Bela Lugosi was ugly, but he had a great mind. I mean, some of the greatest works of art were done by Satan-worshipers like Shakespeare and Michelangelo! And the next time your car throws a rod on I-90 between Presho and Kennebec because you lost your dipstick yo
u should think, even if it is a hundred and ten in the shade, forty-four Celsius and there are red-winged blackbirds coming at you like Bell AH-64s or something. Put the goddamn zucchini in later next time and it won’t get so mushy! I know this is strong and direct and undiplomatical, but this is real life and I can’t be like you and phrase it like blue tennis-shoe laces hanging from the rear-view mirror. See?”

  Here he stopped. Krupp had listened patiently, occasionally looking away to restack his notes or puff on his cigar. “No,” he said. “Do you have a question, son?”

  Emotionally wounded, Dex Fresser shook his head back and forth and gestured around it as though tearing off a heavy layer of tar. While his companions supported him, another SUBbie rose to take his place. She was of average height, with terribly pale skin and a safety pin through her septum. She rose like a zeppelin on power takeoff, and began to read in a singsong voice from a page covered with arithmetic.

  “Mister Krupp, sir. Last year. According, to the Monoplex Monitor, you, I mean the Megaversity Corporation ruling clique, spent ten thousand dollars on legal fees for union-busting firms. Now. There are forty thousand students at American Megaversity. This means that on the average, you spent…four thousand million dollars on legal fees for union-busting alone! How do you justify that, when in this very city people have to pay for their own abortions?”

  Krupp simply stared in her direction and took three long slow puffs on his cigar without saying anything. Then he turned to the blackboard. “This weather’s not getting any better,” he said, quickly drawing a rough outline of the United States. “It’s this low pressure center up here. See, the air coming into it turns around counterclockwise because of the Coriolis effect. That makes it pump cold air from Canada into our area. And we can’t do squat about it. It’s a hell of a thing.” He turned back to the audience. “Next question!”

  The SUB wanted to erupt at this, but they were completely nonplused and hardly said anything. “I’ve taken too many questions from the kill-babies-not-seals crowd,” Krupp announced. He called on Ephraim Klein, who had been waving his hand violently.

  “President Krupp, I think the question of adherence to an inner Law is just a semantic smokescreen around the real issue, which is neurological. Our brains have two hemispheres with different functions. The left one handles the day-to-day thinking, conventional logical thought, while the right one handles synthesis of incoming information and subconsciously processes it to form conclusions about what the basic decisions should be—it converts experience into subconscious awareness of basic patterns and cause-and-effect relationships and gives us general direction and a sense of conscience. So this stuff about autonomy is nothing more than an effort by neurologically ignorant metaphysicists to develop, by groping around in the dark, an explanation for behavior patterns rooted in the structure of the brain.”

  Krupp answered immediately. “So you mean to say that the right hemisphere is the source of what I call the inner Law, and that rather than being a Law per se it is merely a set of inclinations rooted in past experience which tells the left hemisphere what it should do.”

  “That’s right—in advanced, conscious people. In primitive unconscious bicameral people, it would verbally speak to the left hemisphere, coming as a voice from nowhere in times of decision. The left hemisphere would be unable to do otherwise. There would be no decision at all—so you would have perfect adherence to the Law of the right hemisphere voice, absolute autonomy, though the voice would be attributed to gods or angels.”

  Krupp nodded all the way through this, squinting at Klein. “You’re one of those, eh?” he asked. “I’ve never been convinced by Jaynes’ theory myself, though he has some interesting points about metaphors. I don’t think an ignorant carpenter like Jesus had all that flawless theology pumped into the left half of his brain by stray neural currents.” He thought about it for a moment. “Though it would be a lot quieter around here if everyone were carrying his stereo around in his skull.”

  “Jesus,” said Ephraim Klein, “you don’t believe in God, do you? You?”

  “Well, I don’t want to spend too much time on this freshman material, uh—what’s your name? Ezekiel? Ephraim. But you ought to grapple sometime with the fact that this materialistic monism of yours is self-refuting and thus totally bankrupt. I guess it’s attractive to someone who’s just discovered he’s an intellectual—sure was to me thirty years ago—but sometime you’ve got to stop boxing yourself in with this intellectual hubris.”

  Klein nearly rocketed from his chair and for a moment said nothing. He was bolt upright, supporting his weight on one fist thrust down between his thighs into the seat, chewing deeply on his lower lip and staring, to use a Krupp phrase, “like a coon on the runway.” “Non sequitur! Ad hominem!” he cried.

  “I know, I know. Tell you what. Stick around and I’ll listen to your Latin afterward, we’re losing our audience.” Krupp began looking for a new questioner. From the back of the hall came the sound of a fold-down seat bounding back up into position, and we turned to make out the ragged figure of Bert Nix.

  “Krupp cuts a fart! The sphinxter cannot hold!” he bellowed hoarsely, and sat back down again.

  Krupp mainly ignored this, as his aides strode up the aisle to show Mr. Nix where the exit was, and turned his attention to the next questioner, a tall redheaded SUBbie who accused Krupp of accepting bribes to let wealthy idiots into the law school. Red added, “I keep asking you this question, Septimius, and you’ve never answered it yet. When are you going to pay some attention to my question?”

  Krupp looked disgusted and puffed rapidly, staring at him coldly. Bert Nix paused in the doorway to shout: “My journey is o’er rocks & mountains, not in pleasant vales; I must not sleep nor rest because of madness & dismay.”

  “Yeah,” said Krupp, “and I give you the same answer every time, too. I didn’t do that. There’s no evidence I did. What more can I say? I genuinely want to satisfy you.”

  “You just keep slinging the same bullshit!” shouted the SUBbie, and slammed back down into his seat.

  Casimir Radon listened to these exchanges with consuming interest. This was what he had dreamed of finding at college: small lectures on pure ideas from the president of the university, with discussion afterward. That the SUBbies had disrupted it with a pie-throwing made him sick; he had stared at them through a haze of anger for the last part of the meeting. Had he been sitting by the side door he could have tripped that bastard. Which would have been good, because Sarah Jane Johnson was sitting there three rows in front of him, totally unaware of his existence as usual.

  Sarah’s entrance, several minutes before the start of the lecture, had thrown Casimir into a titanic intellectual struggle. He now had to decide whether or not to say “hi” to her. After all, they had had a date, if you could call stammering in the Megapub for two hours a date. Later he had realized how dull it must have been for her, and was profoundly mortified. Now Sarah was sitting just twenty feet away, and he hated to disrupt her thoughts by just crashing in uninvited; better for her not to know he was there. But in case she happened to notice him, and wondered why he hadn’t said “hi,” he made up a story: he had come in late through the back doors.

  He also wanted to ask Krupp a question, a dazzling and perceptive question that would take fifteen minutes to ask, but he couldn’t think of one. This was regrettable, because Krupp was a man he wanted to know, and he needed to impress him before making his sales pitch for the mass driver.

  At the same time, he was working on a grandiose plan for gathering damaging information on the university, but this seemed stupid; seen from this lecture hall, American Megaversity looked pretty much the way it had in the recruiting literature.

  He would continue with Project Spike until it gave him satisfaction. Whether or not he released the information depended on what happened at the Big U between now and then.

  Sarah’s voice sounded in one ear. “Casimir. Earth to Casimir. Come in, Casim
ir Radon.” Shocked and suddenly breathless, he sat up, looking astonished.

  “Oh,” he said casually. “Sarah. Hi. How’re you doing?”

  “Fine,” she answered, “didn’t you see me?”

  Eventually they went into the hallway, where S. S. Krupp was down to the last inch of his cigar and having a complicated discussion with Ephraim Klein. His aides stood to the sides brushing hairs off their suits, various alien-looking philosophy majors listened intently and I leaned against a nearby wall watching it all.

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?” Krupp was saying. “You’re a Jaynesian and a materialistic monist. In which case you’ve got no reason to believe anything you think, because anything you think is just a predetermined neural event which can’t be considered true or logical. Self-refuting, son. Think about it.”

  “But now you’ve gotten off on a totally different argument!” cried Klein. “Even if we presume dualism, you’ve got to admit that intellectual processes reflect neural events in some way.”

  “Well, sure.”

  “Right! And since the bicameral mind theory explains human behavior so well, there’s no reason, even if you are a dualist, to reject it.”

  “In some cases, okay,” said Krupp, “but that doesn’t support your original proposition, which is that Kant was just trying to rationalize brain events through some kind of semantic necromancy.”

  “Yes it does!”

  “Hell no it doesn’t.”

  “Yes it does!”

  “No it doesn’t. Sarah!” said Krupp warmly. He shook her hand, and the philosophy majors, seeing that the intelligent part of the conversation was done, vaporized. “Glad you could come tonight.”

  “Hello, President Krupp. I wish you’d do this more often.”

  “Wait a minute,” yelled Klein, “I just figured out how to reconcile Western religion and the bicameral mind.”

  “Well, take some notes quick, son, there’s other people here, we’ll get to it. Who’s your date, Sarah?”