"Richard Powers - Galatea 22" - читать интересную книгу автора (Powers Richard)

exhausted peace with each other. I did school's home stretch here, learned to decline and differentiate,
program and compose. U. was where I took Professor Taylor's life-changing freshman seminar. Twelve
years later, a stranger to the town, I passed through to watch Taylor die with horrific dignity.
U. was the place where I first saw how paint might encode politics, first heard how a sonata layered
itself like a living hierarchy, first felt sentences cadence into engagement. I first put myself up inside the
damp chamois of another person's body in U. First love smelted, sublimated, and vaporized here in four
slight years.
I betrayed my beloved physics in this town, shacked up with lit-erature. My little brother called me
here to tell me Dad was dead. I tied my life to C.'s in U. We took off from U. together, blew the peanut
stand to go browse the world and be each other's whole adult-hood, an adventure that ended at
thirty-five. The odds were against this backwater having anything left to throw at me.
Since my last trip back, I'd achieved minor celebrity status. Local Boy Makes Good. I'd never get
my name on the city-limits sign. That honor was reserved for the native Olympic legend. But I now had
the credentials to win a year's appointment to the enormous new Center for the Study of Advanced
Sciences. My official title was Visitor. Unofficially, I was the token humanist. My third novel earned me
the post. The book was a long, vicarious re-creation of the scientific career I never had. The Center saw
me as a liaison with the outside community. It had resources to spare, the office cost them little, and I
was good PR. And who knew? A professional eavesdropper with a track record might find no end of
things to write about in an operation that size.
I had no desire to write about science. My third novel exhausted me for the topic. I was just then
finishing a fourth book, a reaction against cool reason. This new book was fast becoming a bleak,
ba-roque fairy tale about wandering and disappearing children.
Even I could not fail to see the irony. Here I was, crawling back to the setting I had fictionalized in my
sprawling science travelogue. The University put me up in a house, the seventies equivalent of the
barracks where the hero of my book had lived on his arrival in town. Beyond a lone bed and desk, I left
my rooms unfurnished, in my character's honor.
I bought a secondhand bike, perfect for the stretch from my house to the Center. The research
complex had sprung up since my last visit. A block-long building in a town the size of U. cannot help but
make a statement. The Center's architecture laid irony upon irony. It was a postmodern rehash of
Flemish Renaissance. In the Low Coun-tries, I'd lived in postwar poured concrete.
The Center had been built by an ancient donor couple, two people archaic enough to get through life
still married to each other. They reached the end of that shared existence with nothing better to do with
the odd fifty million than to advance advanced science. I don't know if they had children, or what the kids
were slated to get when the folks passed away.
U. got a warren of offices, computer facilities, conference areas, wet and dry labs, and an auditorium
and cafeteria, all under that jumble of Flemish gables. The small city housed several hundred scientists
from assorted disciplines. Thankless Ph.D. candidates did the bulk of the experimental drudge work,
supervised to various de-grees by senior researchers from all over the world.
Work at the Center divided into areas so esoteric I could not tell their nature from their names. Half
the fields were hyphenated. Creative play spilled over borders, cross-pollinating like hybrid corn in heat.
Talk in its public spaces sounded like a UN picnic: excited, wild, and mutually unintelligible. I loved how
you could never be sure what a person did, even after they explained it to you.
Most attention converged on complex systems. At the vertex of several intersecting raysтАФartificial
intelligence, cognitive science, vi-sualization and signal processing, neurochemistryтАФsat the culminat-ing
prize of consciousness's long adventure: an owner's manual for the brain. With its countless discrete and
massively parallel subsys-tems, the Center seemed to me a block-wide analog of that neuronal mass it
investigated.
The Center and two dozen similar places here and abroad would decide whether the species would
earn its last-minute reprieve or blow the trust fund the way it intended. The footrace would photo-finish
here, as life came down to the wire. Bio-chips, seeded to grow across the complexity threshold.