" 'Merriment begin a chase. . merriment a quarrel,' " Helen read, from her digital copy. " 'Assault and battery of the wind'?"
"He means the storm." How many fallacies I committed, with that mean. "Remember? The howling? He means all the anger in the world. The hatred."
" 'Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.' He means the storm won't blow the bird from the bough."
"Very good, sweet. If the mind has no hatred, hatred cannot hurt it."
" 'An intellectual hatred is the worst, so let her think opinions are accursed.' "
" 'All hatred driven hence, the soul recovers radical innocence and learns at last that it is self-delighting, self-appeasing, self-affrighting.' "
A figure in uniform slammed around the office-door frame.
"Sir, please leave right now by the south central stairwell. We have an order to evacuate the building."
I looked at him with total vacuity.
"Now, sir! We're asking that you not dick around, please." He slapped the frame with a rigid palm, then sprinted to the next office to spread the alarm.
I sat flapping a moment, as wash flaps in the real's breeze. I tried to shake myself into focus. Which of the various evacuations was under way? I ticked off the short list, calculating, until it hit me that calculation was moot.
I scanned the office: what to try to rescue? Lentz was abroad at one of connectionism's endless professional gatherings. What would he want saved? I cared for just one thing here, and she wasn't even here. She wasn't even a thing but a distributed process. Nothing of Helen existed in this room except her accoutrements, eyes and ears and mouth, dumb machines not worth carrying out.
Through the window, knots of scientists gathered on the south grounds. From my distance, they might have been refugees from any of the world's violent misgivings. They milled among handcarts of hastily heaped equipment, papers, floppies. We might have been in one of those perennial urban war zones, where research goes on in lean-tos of corrugated tin, on the run from the savagery it has armed and encouraged by whole catalogs of neglect.
I stood paralyzed. Instinct instructed me to duck down until sanity condescended to flit back to the feeder. I would have, had not another uniform shouted from the hall, behind a human trail drive. "Let's go. Move it, now."
I told Helen I would be right back. In the main corridor, people congregated, vocalizing. The uniforms tried to move them along, with limited success. One officer gestured back toward Lentz's. "Is everyone out of there?"
I threw my hands up in the air. They came down clasped, against my head. "Yes," I screamed at him. And followed in shame to the safety outside.
There a police line condensed, a bumblebee black-and-yellow plastic strip erecting a barricade from nothing. One of those two-D Euclidean imaginaries that separate the sentient body from the site of politics. The Center's refugees clustered in chains, splitting and linking, staring back at the magnificent, emptied building as if the mystery might yield to visual inspection. Researchers clumped in conversation; even clueless outrage had to be talked out.
The police herded back the mass. They told everyone to go home until further notice. The MRI team, beyond frantic, pressed for information. Their equipment trapped inside the building included a behemoth prototype that cost more than the GNPs of half a dozen southern nations. I saw Ram at a distance. He was trying to comfort a distraught colleague whose brain bursts could have been read from across campus without an imager.
I came across Chen and Harold in the crowd. They stood picking lint off each other's tweed jackets. "Hey, Ricko," Harold greeted me. "Bomb scare. Somebody made a threat this morning on the radio call-in program."
"Hey," Chen echoed. He turned back to Harold. "Why you are not nervous?"
"Ha. I've done this before."
"The Center has had bomb scare before?"
"Oh, not here. In another life."
"Harold," I interrupted. "She's still in there."
His face ticked with panic. "She can't be. She's—" He drew up short when he hit on whom I meant. "Oh, for God's sake. You have her backed up somewhere, don't you?" His irritation was audible and crushing.
"Harold. She's not a program. She's an architecture. She's a multidimensional shape."
"You run her on silicon, don't you? Somebody downloads all those hosts to tape every week and archives them to remote sites."
"But she doesn't run on one machine. Her parts are spread over more boxes than I can count. She's grown to scores of subassemblies. Each one takes care of a unique process. They talk to each other across broadband. Even if we had the connects and vectors for each component system, we'd never get her reassembled."
Harold fell quiet. I could follow his thoughts. If the threat detonated, Helen would be the least of the Center's tragedies. The real hostages — clues to mental illness and immunological disorders, cathedrals of supercomputer engineering, insights into complexities from market turbulence to weather — dwarfed our strange sideshow. Only respect for the hours I'd put into the training kept him from annoyance. He gave me too much credit to credit what I thought.
"Well." He grimaced. "There seems to be no way to rescue her, then."
"Humorous," Chen decided. Chen was a theoretician. Chen stood to lose nothing, even if the fifty-five-million-dollar building and its irreplaceable contents collapsed in rubble.
I walked away, furious at idiocy in all its levels. My mind raced, and I gunned it. The Quad teemed with undergrads, heading for their two o'clock, indifferent to the fact that their campus flagship was about to blow.
Reflex landed me in front of English. The basement computer lab might have crawled with my colleagues. A. might have been there. I would not have known. I linked in to the Center over the coaxial backbone. I could not hear Helen's voice to read how it sounded. But the words that came across the screen asked, "Something is happening?"
I told her what was happening, as best as I could figure it.
"Helen could die?" Helen asked. "Extraordinary." She'd liked the story of how the novelist Huxley, on his deathbed, had been reduced to this one word.
She waited for me to say something. I could think of nothing to say. Helen had to do all the talking. "To a little infant, perhaps, birth is as painful as the other."
"Bacon," I said. It had not been that long.
"Francis Bacon," she encouraged me. "What says Browne? Sir Thomas?" she quizzed. By emulation.
"We all labor against our own cure."
"Never mind." She often said Never mind when I think she meant Don't worry. "Death will cure all the diseases." She meant that I, too, could pass the exam. If I put my mind to it.
In the end, the day belonged to those who stuck with the status quo. By evening, the Center's bomb scare had never happened. Time's hoax-to-explosion ratio increased infinitesimally.
The perpetrator was a junior professor in philosophy with a book out on Austin and Wittgenstein who, for reasons that now seemed obvious, had just been denied tenure. The police snagged the "Short-Fuse Philosopher" when he called the radio station back to elaborate.
Booked and jailed, he stuck by this second call, a linguistic equivocation that he seemed to hope would keep him from a decade in prison. He claimed his threat was never more than a moral subjunctive. The Center was draining the university dry, reducing the humanities to an obsolete, embarrassing museum piece. He'd made his point, he said. If there were any justice, there would have been a bomb. He'd proclaimed no more than hypothetical detonation, for which he expected no more than a hypothetical sentence.
"She's conscious," I accused Lentz, the instant he unpacked.