“Why, thank you, Mick.”
“. . . shot by a jealous husband.”
By the middle of the afternoon, Evelyn could feel travel fatigue and jet lag catching up with her, on top of everything else. The room seemed to be rocking, and the faces and conversation were all smearing into a meaningless blur of sound and color. “I have to go up to the room and rest,” she told Corrigan. “Can we make some excuse and get away?”
“Good idea,” Corrigan mumbled—he wasn’t looking especially bright-eyed and spiffy, just at that moment, himself. “There’s going to be a party later, up at the house.”
Evelyn shook her head dismally. “I’m not going to survive this.”
“We’re away,” Corrigan announced to everyone. “Got to get a few hours’ sleep. Have fun. We’ll catch you later, okay?”
“Would you get that? He can’t wait.”
Ribald jeers and catcalls, mainly from the male company present.
“Tch, tch. What’s the world coming to, at all?”
“Not an ounce of decency in the man.”
“Will you give over?” Corrigan protested. “We’ve not even unpacked yet.”
“Well, while you’re at it you can unpack this as well.” Jeff, one of the cousins, handed Corrigan a gift-wrapped box. Corrigan tore off the paper and added it to the pile of gifts and wrappings that had accumulated on the table, and opened the box. Inside was a figurine of a grinning Irish leprechaun, sporting a high hat and puffing a pipe. “To take back with ye’s and remind you of us,” the cousin said.
“It’ll do that, all right, Jeff,” Corrigan said. “Sure, it even looks like you.”
“He needs a name,” one of the women called out. “You have to give him a name, Joe.”
Corrigan looked around him. “Ah, what else is he but a Mick, of course? We’ll call him Mick.”
Mick moved over and stared down approvingly at his namesake. “He looks happy enough to be a Mick,” he agreed.
One of the men across the table started to sing, “When Irish eyes are smiling . . .” He looked at Corrigan and raised a hand invitingly for him to take it from there.
Corrigan couldn’t. He was too exhausted, and the drink was hitting him the wrong way . . . and besides, he didn’t remember the words. Then Marvin Minsky’s line came to him, from the day when Corrigan and Evelyn had visited Boston. Grinning faces on every side waited for him to continue the song. He tossed up a hand, acknowledging defeat, and grinned.
“You’ve probably just been ripped off. . . .”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Corrigan sometimes said that Europeans had exported Puritanism and the work ethic to America in order to be rid of both, and then get back to the business of enjoying life. The Christmas week that followed became one long round of eating, drinking, dancing, and more drinking, that persisted through into the New Year. By custom, annual holidays east of the Atlantic tended to be generous, and most people saved a healthy portion of them for the year’s end. It seemed that nobody was at work who didn’t have to be, and Evelyn lost track of the homes that were visited, and the pubs and hotel lounges sampled in the annual tribal loyalty-reaffirmation rites. Like many visitors to Ireland, she had a feeling of rediscovering the basics of simple warmth and spontaneous familiarity that can be too easily forgotten when pursuit of wealth and what passes for success becomes obsessive. Even allowing that she was being a bit romantic and impractical for the modern world, she suspended her disbelief willingly and delighted in fond reconstructions of bygone times, doubtless illusory, sparkling with wisdom and elegance that had probably never existed; but, after all, wasn’t this supposed to be the most romantic time of her life?
What marred it a little was Corrigan saying scoffingly that she sounded like a tourist. For him this was just a break. He was becoming impatient to get back to the arena. Americans, it was often said—especially those with Irish roots that were imaginary—could be more Irish than the Irish. It was sometimes true the other way around, too. Mick was not a lot of help in sustaining her romantic images of unsullied Irish charm and simplicity, either.
One evening in one of the seafront hotels, the customers sitting around the lounge began taking it in turns to sing solo. Every one of them seemed to have a party piece, which the rest would listen to appreciatively and applaud loudly—a far cry from dingy downtown bars where people went to get drunk, laid, or lost in anonymity. At one point, Evelyn felt her eyes misting as she listened to a wistful, soaring tenor voice evoking visions of homey farm cottages and green hillsides swept with rain.
“Can everyone over here sing?” she whispered, leaning across to Corrigan and Mick.
“Ah, it’s the drink that does it. He’ll be croaking like a rusty gate by morning,” Mick told her, ruining the whole effect.
“Most of those songs were written by people who’d been away from Ireland so long that they forgot what it was like,” Corrigan said.
“Or never been there, more like,” Mick agreed.
“Six months over here, and you’d be writing the same about Pittsburgh,” Corrigan told Evelyn.
They did visit Trinity College, finally, with its stiffly aristocratic frontages of gray, columned stone, staring down over an inner maze of interlocking lawns and cobbled courts. Evelyn was fascinated by the famous Long Room chamber of the Old Library, built in 1724, with its wood paneling, carvings, and gallery, containing hundreds of thousands of volumes going back to medieval times and before. Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, George Berkeley, and Oscar Wilde had been students here, and again, walking among the ceiling-high shelves of cracked leather bindings and yellowing folios, Evelyn found herself reliving images of a time of tastes and sensitivities that had passed—even with the brash intrusion of a gaudily modern gift-and-souvenir shop, underneath on the ground floor.
They shopped in O’Connell Street, had lunch in the open, airy environment—with the sun actually putting in an appearance that day, reassuring the faithful of its existence—of the glass-enclosed mall by Stephen’s Green. They saw Georgian squares and walked over the bridges along the Liffey, jostled through street markets, and took the tour of the Guinness brewery.
And, partly as an aid to working off the effects of a week’s overindulging, they joined the crowd of afternoon strollers walking the best part of a mile out to the lighthouse at the end of Dun Laoghaire pier. The weather that day—Mick said that four seasons a day was the norm in Ireland—was fine and dry, the wind brisk, the sea air bracing.
“I think it’s wonderful,” Evelyn said to Corrigan and Mick. “All these people out walking just for the pleasure of it. It’s more the way things should be. Back home legs are getting to be for emergencies only.”
“Have you seen what the price of gas is here?” Corrigan snorted.
Back at the house, Helen Corrigan showed her the traditional way of making tea, in a pot. “I don’t care what those two say,” Evelyn declared as they set out cups, saucers, sugar, and milk on a tray in the kitchen. “I think they do it to twig me. It’s a side of the humor that I haven’t really figured out yet. But people here still have a charm that you don’t find in many places around the world these days.”
“Ah yes, it’s the charm of them that you have to watch,” Helen replied, smiling faintly as she cut slices of still-unfinished Christmas cake.
“How’s that?”
“People will behave as outrageously as the world will let them. And charm is how they extend the limits. Joe can be one of the worst. But it’s not a lot of good telling you that now, I suppose.”
Finally, Corrigan and Evelyn said their goodbyes and au revoirs to a final gathering of relatives and friends, and loaded their bags into Dermot’s eighties-vintage Rover. Then they left Dun Laoghaire to drive across to Galway on the west coast of Ireland, where, as hoped, Dermot had arranged for them to visit Corrigan’s former professor, Brendan Maguire, at Ballygarven before their return to the States.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
More rooms with fluorescent lights and pastel walls, racks of electronics, glowing computer screens. Not rooms formed of movable partition-walls and ceiling tiles, but solidly built from stone, with mullioned bay windows, modernized to a laboratory environment. Maguire had installed his research outpost of Trinity in a large old house a little above the town itself, known locally as “The Rectory.”
Maguire himself was a short, rounding, Pickwickian figure with a crescent of ragged white hair fringing a balding head that had taken on the same, post-holidays, pinkish hue as his face. He had a pair of ferocious white eyebrows, and rimless spectacles that tended to sit halfway down a bulbous, purple-veined nose. He was wearing a crumpled tweed jacket of brown-and-tan check with a woven tie, plaid shirt, and baggy gray flannel trousers with turnups that hadn’t been in style in fifteen years. From appearances, Evelyn would have dismissed him as a bumbling rural schoolteacher. Corrigan told her not to be deceived: it was Maguire’s insistence on accurate thinking and old-fashioned rigor that Corrigan had to thank for his later successes in the States.
There was little here in the way of visually entertaining demonstrations. Maguire showed them screens of symbolic diagrams representing abstract software relationships, and charts that tracked growth and decay trends in mixed populations of numerically defined entities that he referred to as “species.” The term was no misnomer. The aim of the research that Maguire and his team were engaged in was, in effect, to induce the emergence of intelligent behavior from neural-system analogs.
“. . . assuming that anything that has appeared in the natural world so far can be called intelligent,” Maguire said. “The notion shouldn’t be so strange to you, Joe. We talked about it often enough.”
“We did, that.”
Dermot elaborated for Evelyn’s benefit. “The idea, essentially, is to let a computer-intelligence follow the same route as we did and evolve from simple beginnings—instead of trying to reproduce in one step all the complexity that resulted from a billion years of selection and improvement.”
“I’ve never believed that was practical, as I’m sure Joe will have told you,” Maguire said to Evelyn.
She smiled. “At least a thousand times, at the last count. Top-down won’t work, right?”
“That’s right. We simply don’t have the detailed knowledge to specify it,” Maguire said. “Nobody has.”
“So how far back did you go to begin?” Corrigan asked him, intrigued.
“The groupings that I showed you a few minutes ago approximate roughly to early molecular structures,” Maguire replied. “We put a seed population into a simple world in large numbers and let them interact and compete. They’ve been running for the equivalent of several million years now, I’d say.”
“And the species you have now are performing at about the level of insects?”
“Roughly, we think. The dynamics are completely different from biological competition. Making a direct comparison isn’t easy.”
“Pretty impressive, all the same,” Corrigan commented.
“We do have the benefit of being able to guide things by conscious direction,” Maguire pointed out. “We are able to introduce deliberately engineered genetic combinations when we see fit. That speeds up the process considerably. It’s amazing the difference it makes when God goes into the stock-breeding business.”
“It’s fascinating, all right,” Corrigan agreed. There was an odd light in his eyes. Listening to Maguire and Dermot had rekindled all kinds of enthusiasms from years that he had almost forgotten. He could feel the excitement of real science stirring again: knowledge pursued purely for the sake of knowledge.
“But we need a more realistic simulation of the physical environment if progress is to be sustained,” Maguire went on. “One that will react back on the actions of the population more strongly and drive the selection mechanisms harder. It needs to close the overall organism-environment feedback loop more tightly.”
“This is interesting. . . .” Corrigan’s face took on a faraway look for a moment. “Kind of ironic.”
Maguire looked at the others uncertainly. “What is he talking about?”
“The work that we’re doing back at CLC right now,” Evelyn answered. “On the face of it, it sounds as if it might be an answer to just the kind of problem you’re talking about.”
“Is that so?” Dermot said.
“In that case, you should stop messing around among those Americans, trying to act as if you were a millionaire or a celebrity or something, and get yourself back over here and help out,” Maguire told Corrigan—but he wasn’t being serious.
“No chance,” Dermot declared. “He’s been too seduced by now by thoughts of money and promotion in those big corporations over there.”
Maguire snorted. “Well, don’t let yourself be carried away by it all,” he said to Corrigan. “Remember that the higher a monkey climbs, the more of an arse it looks.”
Corrigan grinned. “Okay. But I will make sure you get all the information we can let you have that might help,” he offered.
“That would be something we’d appreciate,” Maguire said.
For lunch they drove down to the Cobh Hotel in the center of the town, which was where Corrigan and Evelyn were staying. Ballygarven was a small boating resort grown from a fishing village that stood at the head of an inlet where the sea twisted its way among rocky headlands and shingle beaches. Behind the town, heather-covered slopes and marshlands rose toward a ridge of granite-topped summits a mile or two away. Evelyn was doubly glad that she and Corrigan had decided to make this trip to the west of Ireland before they left. It was just as she had pictured, ever since Dermot began describing it soon after their arrival.
Food was served in the bar, which though modernized had not lost its old-world feel. Maguire steered Evelyn and Dermot to one side where there stood a table for hot food and another for salads, recommending the mussels and the lamb. Meanwhile, Corrigan went to the bar to take care of the drinks. He and Evelyn had checked in the evening before, and he already knew Rooney, the bartender. Several of the locals were in, taking a midday refreshment.
“Oh, the American’s back, I see,” Rooney said, taunting Corrigan good-humoredly. “Coca-Cola, is it? Or do I have to start mixin’ some o’ them fancy cocktails for ye?”
“Three pints, and enough of your lip, Rooney. And a glass of lager-and-lime for the lady, if you please.”
“Are ye’s back to see some decent scenery? Sure, don’t the mountains way up above look green and fresh in the sunshine this mornin’, after the rain?”
Corrigan looked pained. “What mountains are you talking about, Rooney? You don’t call those humps out there mountains, do you? I’ll tell you, we were in the Sierra Nevada in California just before the holidays, and there’s real mountains for you. They’ve got one cliff called El Capitan, in the Yosemite Valley, that goes practically a mile straight up.”
“Is that a fact?” Rooney said, putting a glass under one of the pumps. “And what would be the use of things as big as that to anyone at all? Our Irish mountains have got a top and a bottom to them, and that’s all that matters. Why waste so much on all that useless middle? If you stand a little bit nearer they look the same anyway. But you don’t have to spend half your life getting up, and then back down again.” Rooney looked at the regulars in appeal. “Isn’t that right, now?”
“It’s fine by me,” one of them agreed. “I’d never be seen dead on the top of either one of them anyway.”
“You see, I was right. It’s after turning into a Yank, you are. Everything has to be biggest, and that’s all that matters. Never a thought for the quality of things.”
“And when were you last there, Rooney?” Corrigan challenged.
“Oh, you’d be surprised if I told you, wouldn’t you?”
“Go on, then. Surprise me.”
Rooney set a foaming pint down on the countertop for the head to settle, and began pouring another. “Oh, I know all about the high lif
e and such, as you might call it,” he said airily. “I’m what you might call something of a self-unmade man.”
“Oh? A self-unmade man, is it?” one of the locals said.
“And what might that be?” another asked.
“I started out, long ago in me dim and distant youth, as the president of a big corporation, making half a million dollars a year,” Rooney said. “But would you believe, I needed every blessed penny of it. There was the yacht to take care of, the private jet plane, and the mortgage on the mansion. All them social clubs and country clubs and golfing clubs, with their dues. . . . And you wouldn’t want to hear about the kind of wife I had to put up with, and her tastes.”
“Would ye listen to the man?”
“Okay. And? . . .” Corrigan said, smiling.
Rooney went on, “But I worked hard and assiduously, and by the time I was twenty-five I’d come down to regional manager. Got rid of the house for something smaller, the car for something slower, the wife for someone saner, and I found I could manage on two hundred thousand a year. So I paid off the debts, kept at it, and I was down to a branch manager by thirty, ordinary salesman by thirty-four, and I quit the salaried professions altogether before I was forty.”
“Now there’s a success story for you,” one of the regulars murmured approvingly.
“It’s different. I’ll give you that,” his companion agreed.
Rooney nodded. “By then I didn’t need a salary anymore. Today, I don’t owe anybody anything, and this job pays me all I need. It’s only four shifts a week, and I get plenty of time to read the books I always wanted to, sit in the sun when it suits me, and go fishing with the kids.” He thought for a moment, then shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I probably don’t need the money that much at all, for we’ve a small farm that could get us by. But I keep it for the people that you meet.”
Evelyn and the others had come over and were listening. “Another philosopher,” she said to Corrigan. “You know, Joe, this is the kind of place that Eric should be in.”
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