“True. After our last trip, we definitely have to go back there. We could go on bike like you wanted and take a look at the windmills and tulips and all the other stuff.”
“I’ve never seen any old windmills, only the modern wind turbines. There are loads of them everywhere now, not just in Holland.”
In confirmation of these words a row of immensely high wind turbines appeared on their left, smoothly taking the air. Isaac counted eight of them, brand new ones with multiple propellers, fifty meters high, if not more. Once they all used to be white or grey, but these were painted all different colors. A pink one with black blades looked the zaniest. Where the row of turbines ended, an elevated road began with a tunnel following it. After the tunnel there was a filling station. Bikie reduced speed and got into the line on the far right.
“I need an Italian cappuccino,” he explained “and bathroom.”
At the filling station the guys topped up the tank with petrol and each ordered an absolutely delicious doppio cappuccino, and then sat down on plastic chairs under a sunshade outside.
It was amazing, you only had to cross the Italian border and the cappuccino, even at a filling station, was totally different. Either the Italian milk tasted better, or the water was purer, but the brew was divinely delicious.
“Italian cappuccino and a panini. Not just a snack, it’s a party!” said Isaac, smiling with pleasure.
“I don’t like paninis,” said Bikie. “I’m more a pizza man. I once read that Italians prefer Margarita to any other kind because it’s impossible to spoil it.
“Before that I used to take ‘four cheeses’ or seafood, I liked it with salami too, and I never took a simple Margarita. What for, when there are such delicious kinds with all sorts of toppings and fancy doodads? But after I read that article, I ordered a Margarita. And I didn’t regret it. It really was delicious, and the cheapest kind as well. Since then I only eat Margarita, although I used to laugh at people who took it, I thought they were dummies.”
After they had their snack and cleared the table, the guys moved on. Anyone driving along this autostrada for the first time must surely think it the most beautiful high speed-road in the world. On the right side the sea and endless little Italian towns; on the left mountains buried in greenery. The road ran at a height of one to two hundred meters. The view was magnificent.
Some of the viaducts were well over a kilometer long, some curved round like sickles and then pierced tunnels into the next mountain. On one of them a little old church hung just right above the cars driving below.
Tunnels alternated with viaducts, road bends and tunnels again, and so on and endlessly on. The travelers’ eyes were getting tired. They intermittently took their shades off and on: it was too dark in the tunnels, and blindingly bright outside.
Isaac was feeling much better. Every kilometer the van dived into a new tunnel and shot back out into the sun again. A dark stretch and a bright stretch. After the party at Wolanski’s he had begun a bright stretch, and he wanted it to be a long one.
“Driving into a tunnel is like dying, and the heavenly light at the end is like being reborn into a new life,” he said pensively.
Isaac believed in God, but not in a specific God; he regarded himself as agnostic and didn’t believe in Christ, Allah or Buddha, but he served the commandments: thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and thou shalt not commit evil. He liked the idea of karma too it was like a shield over your head. Good deeds strengthened it, and villains’ karma was rotten, it leaked. Too bad, though, this leakage was not immediate, but sometime in the future.
It was probably karma that had rescued him when he went to download his OE. It had saved him, or the angels had, the words made no difference. He would have become a Veggie a long time ago, if not for Elvis’s fortunate appearance. And then there would never have been Michelle, or Bikie, or Peter, or the long-awaited patent in his life. He felt the urge to share these thoughts with Bikie.
“You know, I’ve thought about God lots of times. My parents were killed, Vicky is sick. But they were very good people, and there was nothing to punish them for. I can’t say I feel glad about ordeals like that. I’m grateful for what he’s given me, but he’s taken away plenty of things too.”
“It depends what God is for you,” Bikie responded.
“As someone who knows about technology, I think of God not just from the viewpoint of faith, but through the prism of science too. For me, God first and foremost is justice and conscience. The ultimate justice based on the actions of each man. And from the standpoint of science, God is infinity.”
“I don’t get it. What’s infinity got to do with it?”
“Well look, what’s more potent and universal, infinity of space or time?”
“Can you really compare them?”
“Yes. As being impossible for our awareness to grasp, you can. Both of them are inconceivable to man, and above all, they’re forever. No matter how far you go, no matter how long you live, there’s always something beyond, something still to come.
“So it turns out that time and infinite space are almost identical. Is there anything bigger than infinity? Longer than time? No. But you can say the same thing about God. What could be bigger and mightier than God? Nothing. So God is both infinity and time. Those are his different manifestations. You can’t say that there are lots of gods in infinity.”
“And it turns out that God didn’t create, but he gave us time and space to exist in. They’re a part of himself that he has shared with us.”
“So God is time?”
“Yes, and he is space too. When I was a kid I went to a planetarium for the first time, and I watched an incredible show, a 3D film on the dome of the building about the earth, the solar system, outer space, the galaxy and the universe. There was loads of interesting stuff in it. And in the end they showed an ordinary man on the screen. The camera started pulling back and the man became a spot compared with a skyscraper, the skyscraper turned into a spot compared to a city, the city - compared to the planet, the planet to the sun.
“Soon even the sun seemed like a microscopic speck compared with other stars, and in turn they were transformed into specks compared with the other big stars we know nowadays. And so on to infinity. A galaxy is a mere speck compared to the universe. There could be hosts of universes. Because, if it is not that way, then what comes after the universe if you fly an infinite distance away from it? There’ll be other universes and something much bigger. Possibly. The universe is a little piece of one of the atoms that make up the wing of some fantastic insect, sitting on some fantastic flower. And the flower grows…”
“In your imagination,” Bikie joked.
“Let me finish. At the end the screen shrank to a tiny dot and disappeared. They turned the lights on and I was dumbfounded, I didn’t think anything could astound me any more at that moment. My stepfather added something else, ‘Isaac,’ he said, ‘I can see you’ve realized how small we are, that there’s something much bigger, and bigger. But that’s not all, you can go in the opposite direction too with things getting smaller. We’re huge compared with some things, as huge as the universe is compared to us. Just imagine, we consist of molecules, and they consist of atoms, but if we had an immense, mega-powerful magnifying glass, we could enlarge an atom and see what it’s made out of, a host of complicated pieces each consisting of particles that are made up of a huge number of universes, which consist of hosts of galaxies, stars and planets, inhabited by someone or something. And so on to infinity’.”
“Yeah, infinity’s mighty stuff,” Bikie declared. He had listened to the theory of God with genuine interest. “You know, Isaac, they should put you on a stake! I’d even lend them my Zippo lighter to light it.” Just a second ago Bikie was serious too, but now he started hooting with laughter in his usual manner.
“A gaping black hole has just appeared in your karma, and the remains of your clueless brain have started evaporating out through it, Bikie.”
“No problem, it was you who just said that my brain is infinite. And even after it has evaporated almost to a frazzle there’ll still be something left. A handful of thoughts and my last three hundred Spartan soldier thoughts will kick ass on your legion of Persian fantasies.”
“That’s right, a battle of
minds. Only be more accurate your last three hundred thoughts will all be about chicks. So your regiment is Spartan women, not Spartan warriors.”
“Please stop fucking with my brain!”
They roared with laughter and cracked jokes, teasing each other although the conversation had supposedly started with a serious subject. God probably invented humor and jovial people especially so that we wouldn’t go gaga trying to understand what comes after the universe or die of boredom.
“Isaac, tell me how does your idea of God and infinity fit together with karma?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. Karma is your identification number, your coordinates in infinity, God can see you after all in the context of infinity, and you’re totally insubstantial. You’re a tiny piece of space and an empty space.”
Isaac couldn’t tell if Bikie was serious. It could easily be a joke. After two hours of traveling the van eventually reached Genoa and the road divided. Driving straight on led into the city, then towards Pisa and on to Rome. The road going left led to Milan and Turin.
“The great Genoese were born in this very city,” thought Isaac, remembering Christopher Columbus. “The man whose curiosity and love of adventure, combined with impudence gave the world the discovery of America and brought gold flooding into the treasury of the Spanish crown causing the deaths of thousands of Indians.”
At first what they saw looked like a fairly run-of-the-mill port and an industrial city but when they reached the historical center everything changed and the city became magnificent. Leaving the van in a car park, the two friends set off to Ferrari square to have a cup of coffee and a light snack. There was plenty worth looking at here.
“Isaac, the spirit of pioneering endeavor dwells in this city,” said Bikie, obviously thinking about the same thing.
“Our goal is different. On the contrary, we want to halt a certain pioneering endeavor. And we’ll do it too, despite its massive upside.”
This was the first and last large city on their route and they felt they couldn’t deny themselves the little joys of a journey. Their mood was excellent, the jokes were as feeble-minded as in the morning and the sun was scorching, forcing them to squint or shut their eyes. Isaac and Bikie were on a high. As for the goal of the journey, it could wait after all, they were not in the army, they did not have precise schedule to go by and were not expected to be stern and serious, with no right to down a couple of beers along the way. So they did. The mug of beer invigorated their philosophical mood.
“Bikie, we have a chance of becoming heroes or anti-heroes. The world has become cleaner and less aggressive; there are no wars, less crime, a whole heap of achievements. Even the fact that Veggies’ children are stupid doesn’t mean that it cannot be fixed. We now see the world striving towards an ideal utopia. Should we fight that? We’re certain to be regarded as terrorists or villains. The funniest thing is that a couple of months ago I would have tried to stop a pair of schizos like you and me.”
Bikie was already getting used to his friend’s fits of self-doubt. Unlike Isaac, he had no second thoughts; he was calm as a boa constrictor.
“The world won’t lose the technologies it has already gained from OE and there’s nothing else good left to look forward to. And don’t quail, before we hack in, we’ll weigh everything up one more time. Now, why don’t you just take a look at those lovelies?”
At that, Bikie strolled rakishly toward two female tourists and introduced himself.
The girls turned out to be Swedish from Stockholm, Stephanie and Carla. They had arrived in the morning on a cruise liner that was leaving for Rome tomorrow. In three days of sailing they had become thoroughly bored and were glad to keep Bikie's and Isaac’s company. They had a great time as Bikie spun tales about the dangerous journey through Africa that the guys had ahead of them, all the way down to Johannesburg, and invited them to look over the van, in which he and Isaac were going to live, sleep and cook as they cut across the dark continent, all the time bewailing the fact that they’d probably miss European women terribly on the journey.
It wasn’t clear if Stephanie and Carla believed in the African trek, but they went to look at the van. Isaac preferred to leave the van and the free-and-easy socializing entirely to Bikie despite the beer he had drunk and the obvious interest he could feel from Stephanie. Michelle Blanche was firmly stuck in his head… and Vicky too. He definitely wasn’t interested in other girls. Isaac tried to drive away his lustful thoughts of Vicky by recalling memories from their childhood, telling himself that they were friends and virtual brother and sister. “No, a confession of that sort will definitely shock her,” he thought. And the last thing he wanted to do was to unsettle Vicky and drive her away from him. He had to admit that even when he started thinking about her, when thoughts of love came up, he caught himself switching back to Michelle. That was probably for the best.
Isaac went for a stroll through Genoa Old Port.
In the meantime, Bikie, without batting an eye, raked both girlfriends up in his arms, promising to tell them about the dangerous hippopotamus well as the cannibalistic customs of some tribes. He began by saying that a male lion usually had several females at once and they made love up to seventeen times a day. The last thing that Isaac heard as he clambered out of the van was the beginning of a story about how girls in Africa often didn’t wear any blouses, preferring the natural look of nakedness.
Bikie didn’t bother to call or text Isaac when the girls left, he fell asleep right there in the middle of the van on top of a crumpled sleeping bag. That was how the furious Isaac found Bikie, all alone, after freezing outside until four in the morning. He was forced to go back to the van, even though his friend hadn’t answered any of his calls or texts.
***
The next morning Isaac and Bikie boarded a ferry to Sardinia.
“Just look at that view! I wonder how some Monet or Picasso would have painted it.”
“He’d have painted it wonderfully. He’d have painted you yesterday pretty well too. With your pants down in a van littered with all sorts of garbage and beer bottles.”
“No one drove you away yesterday. You went yourself. You have no damn reason to be angry. Why don’t you just look how beautiful this is?”
“I think I’ll postpone the nature for a while and get a couple of hours’ sleep.”
But Isaac couldn't go to sleep, the van was stinking of hangover and in the end he had to join Bikie on the deck.
“Nature is an infinity of masterpieces, and any work of art attempts to create a composition, colors and depth that are equal to nature,” Bikie said with a wink, emphasizing the word “infinity”.
“I don’t agree. The artist often doesn’t attempt to produce anything like that. For instance, I don’t understand the phenomenon of Picasso. He definitely didn’t aspire to reproduce the beauty of nature.”
“Well, Picasso’s case is obvious, he’s a genius.”
“If it’s so clear to you, explain to me, stupid as I am, what makes Picasso a genius?
“Picasso has real masterpieces that show his talent. For instance, Girl on a Ball and the famous Peace Dove. The entire pink period. You know what that is, I hope? He has drawings that seem completely childish but still cost crazy money. Picasso is at the very minimum an absolutely brilliant manager. As for his art, I bet you won’t find a single authoritative art export bold enough to criticize Picasso out loud, he’d be torn to pieces. The same with common folks:
“Do you like Picasso?’
“Oh, yes he’s a genius!’
“What do you see in his works?’
&n
bsp; “Well, I see colors, interesting ideas…’
“And what ideas do you see in those squiggles and large daubs? I don’t see any…’
“Who are you to criticize Picasso? You just don’t understand him!’
“And you do?’
“Yes, I do. And other people do too.’
“No one understands him; they all think there are some ‘other people’ who do. But there aren’t any other people. Yes, there are fans that get a real kick out of his works.
“ I suppose, Picasso might have not sought to inject any sense into his work — just painted from his ‘gut feeling’. Only Pablo is dead now and you can’t ask him: ‘Do I understand you correctly?’ In India there’s an elephant that picks up a brush in its trunk and trails it over a canvas or a piece of cardboard. Some smart-ass expert would probably ‘understand’ it if he wasn’t told the picture was painted by an animal.”
“I wonder,” said Isaac, interrupting this dramatic monologue, “how many HITs Picasso had? Must have been a bazillion.”
“It would be funny to find out that he was average, while the people who promoted him have a really high one. Now that would be a hoot.”
“Remember the artist who only became famous after he became a Veggie? After the fact it turned out that he had had a super load of OE, he was one of the highest rated downloaders. The journalists trumpeted the story about, and people started admiring his paintings. He was immediately declared one of the greatest geniuses of modern times.”
“It have always been that way, people often started idolizing a genius only after he died in misery. Not just painters. It happened with Mozart, who died totally destitute. And since he was writing a Requiem when he became fatally ill, a popular rumor spread that he was writing it for himself. Public Relations, although it wasn’t called PR in those days. If people weren’t so fond of spoofs, who knows, maybe all his brilliant compositions would have sunk into oblivion.”
Collective Mind Page 17
