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

the sound, the room was deserted. I bathed in the emptiness. Heaps of equipment, much of it bare
boards and components, shimmered in the dark. Some of these devices pro-duced this ethereal
interpretation, while others only absorbed and contemplated it.
From a cave of instruments in the corner, light glinted off two small surfaces. What I had taken to be
two flat LCD panels flickered into a pair of near-opaque glasses. The creature behind them now gazed at
me without registering anything. Archimedes looking up languidly at the Roman soldier about to run him
through: Don't disturb my circles.
The head attached to these glasses peaked in a balding dome. From freakish frontal lobes it tapered
away to nothing at the temples only to erupt again in a monstrous beak. Even after I oriented the image,
the face shocked me.
The man stretched out on a reclining office chair. His head flung itself back against a flatbed scanner.
His feet kicked up on a mountain of offprints. Even horizontal like this, he could not have been longer
than five and a half feet. Yet his doe-colored jacket and white oxford button-down crept up his arms as if
the knit were unraveling.
I'd never seen this man before, either in these halls or anywhere else. Not even I could forget such a
figure. He must have been at least sixty, in earth years. To judge by his pallor, the fellow avoided all
contact with natural light. His puzzled blink suggested that he avoided human contact, too, to the extent of
his abilities.
Without taking his eyes from me, he continued his series of infin-itesimal hand adjustments in the
space in front of him. He pushed a suite of frictionless hockey pucks about the wired surface of his desk.
The rink looked like a cross between an acupuncture map and a player piano roll. Between the music
and these arcane hand motions, I couldn't decide who led and who followed.
The conductor gestured across his electronic score, locking stares with me until the slow movement
played itself out. Discord and re-solve, the devastating rasp of reed, the musical sequence pushing against
the limits of my cranial sounding post, a grace too huge and slow for understanding.
The lemur-like man appraised me, unselfconscious. We made in-terstellar contact, paralyzed by the
mutual knowledge that any attempt to communicate would be culture-bound. Worse than meaningless.
Silence, after such sound, grew unbearable. I broke first. "Mozart," I said. Having begun to make a
fool of myself, I pressed on and completed the job. "K. # 622. What happened to the finale?"
The man's hands stopped and laced themselves behind his head. He snorted out the side of his
mouth, as if flossing the idea from between his teeth. "No finale. We deal exclusively with middles here."
He picked up the hockey pucks and started to shuffle them again. Music rose from the aural grave.
The clarinet recommenced its para-lyzing simplicity. That perfect phrase breathed in and out just as
before, steeped in stabbing acceptance. But something different un-folded this time. A slower, more
forlorn rumor. Where the difference lay, there was no saying.
The owl-man made his mechanical adjustments, as if he dreamed this music himself, out of a
computational hurdy-gurdy. He flicked switches and fiddled with sliders. My shadow must have snagged
the edge of his retina, because he looked up, surprised to see me still standing in the doorway. "Thank
you for the little chat," he said. "Good night."
I bobbed my head in ridiculous acquiescence and backed down the hall, dismissed to safety.

I don't know what I expected, really. Civility, perhaps. Acknowl-edgment. An exchange of names.
All the social niceties that I'd avoided so studiously since my Dunkirk back here. I obsessed for a day
and a half, inventing ironic, dry comebacks. In my head, I let the man know in no uncertain terms that I
was neither a pest nor ludicrous.
Under cover of daylight, I returned to pinch his name off the office door. Philip Lentz: a name as
Palladian as the man was misshapen. The Center's promotional brochure said he explored cognitive
econ-omies through the use of neural networks. The pamphlet withheld even the foggiest idea of what this
might mean.
For years, back before I saw the photograph that led to my re-tirement from software, I'd made a