Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers

Author:Richard Powers [Powers, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: prose_contemporary, sf
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2004-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

From the day I saw Lentz's picture, my heart took itself off the project. The moment I made him study that snapshot calendar, while I studied him.

"Lentz, you've been jerking me around."

He snorted, if he gave even that much satisfaction. Some crack about my intriguing verb choice. That shifty fluorescent reflection of Coke-bottle glasses. He'd taken down the calendar, hidden it. Maybe even destroyed it. Get the boy's mind back on the chase. His move had the opposite of its intended effect.

"Why are we doing this?"

I stared him down, made explicit, by silence, the threat of a general strike. I was still the only one G listened to. If I didn't talk, the box wasn't going to get any more literate. And I vowed not to talk to G until Lentz talked to me.

"Why are we…? Because, Marcel. Because, if you haven't noticed, I have the unfortunate habit of chewing, in public, more than I am able to bite off."

The closest he'd come to admitting the whole project's haplessness. But also a buyout. A bait-and-switch. A gambit to throw me off, now that I demanded names.

"What's in this for you, Lentz? Why waste a year? What's your motive?"

"Poet. Don't you know by now that science is without—"

"God damn you. Can't you level with me? Once?"

My outburst raised no more than one weary eyebrow.

"What am I to you, that you need to bother yourself over? Use me, if the project interests you. Symbiosis. Otherwise. ." He left the menace hanging, the way a fatigued marathoner leaves spittle dangling from his lips. "Blackbox me. That's the answer. Blackbox the whole sordid process. It works for me."

I flipped on G's microphone. I breathed into it in disgust. I sneered a couplet at it, from memory. "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." LEDs on the coupler recorded G's struggle to paraphrase.

Lentz worked his dry lips. "Powers." Back down the audit trail of his own voice, into someone else's. "Our boy is not ready for irony." He shook his jelly bismarck of a body erect. He went over to the Bartlett's I'd planted on the shelf above the UNIX terminal. "Marmion?" he asked, a good imitation of perplexity. "Walter bloody Scott is on this list? I quit."

I refused to so much as acknowledge him.

For a terrifying moment, he threatened to lay a hand on my shoulder. God knows what fundamental particles such a collision would have spit out.

"Marcel. Marcel." Begging me. I could no longer tell which would be more cowardly — honesty or compassion. "You're really going to make me do this, aren't you?"

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