Grisha had progressed a long way in his molecular-Biblical research over the years, and had completely abandoned experimental science—never relinquishing his beloved notion of the quantum computer, however. He had immersed himself in areas of speculation completely unacceptable to Vitya, always relying on the latest achievements in molecular biology to back up his ideas.
Nevertheless, it was still a funeral repast, and at first they all observed the laws of decorum, without any special effort.
Grisha, as always, was drawn toward the higher spheres. He raised his glass, saying, “How happy I am that I can see you all, even though it is such a sad occasion. And what I would like to say is this: Death is not a glitch in the program, it is contained in the program itself. Nothing slips from the Creator’s grasp. Every human life is a Text. And this Text is necessary, for some reason, to God.”
“I’m not sure what sort of text my mother, Varvara Vasilievna, could communicate to God that He didn’t already know. It seems to me, Grisha, that you’re exaggerating a bit.”
Grisha downed another shot of vodka. “Vitya! Vitya! Every human being is a Text. The mysteries are being unraveled. The twentieth century resolved half the eternal questions that plagued humankind; people just don’t realize it yet. Everything that lives is a Text that has been written over the course of three and a half billion years, from the first living cell to my own granddaughter, born just one week ago—in fulfillment of the command to ‘go forth and multiply.’ And this is the only way of reading and producing the Divine Text. By realizing it. All the information collected by a human being throughout his life becomes part of a general repository—the memory of the Lord God. Varvara Vasilievna gave birth to you, and that was her part in the great work of enduring Creation. Grisha wiped the sweat from his forehead, sighed, and knocked back another glass of vodka.
“All right, all right, just leave my poor mother out of it,” Vitya said, laughing.
Yurik laughed, too. Nora didn’t quite get the gist of what Grisha was saying, but she didn’t feel like questioning him more closely about it. She understood very well, however, that a sense of humor, of which she had never seen any evidence before, had awakened in Vitya. Martha had never impressed her as much of a wit before, either. Did this mean that Vitya, like a sunflower in a field, had bloomed in proximity to his wife, from good light and beneficent watering?
Grisha drank another glass, sighed deeply, and ate a piece of brown bread. Nora pushed a fried chicken leg toward him—“Bush’s Legs,” as they were called at the time, since the foodstuff was an American import. He refused it: he was much more interested in talking than in eating. Besides, he had just consumed a piece of cheese, which was not permitted in combination with chicken, according to Jewish law.
“You see, no one eats those legs but you,” Yurik whispered to her.
It was true—these chicken legs had caused a scandal. People suspected they caused some infection or disease, which the Americans had injected in them. But Nora didn’t care; she wouldn’t turn up her nose even at these dubious legs.
Grisha went on: “The best computer ever made by the Creator is the living cell. It’s impossible to improve on it.”
Vitya jabbed a chicken leg with a fork and picked it up. He had no prejudices about the moral incompatibility of meat and dairy. Anyway, there was nothing in the world he preferred to white bread with his favorite kind of salami.
“Grisha,” Vitya said, “it is possible to improve on it. It’s possible to make a computer that works faster—and they’re already being made, you know that as well as I do. If a program is written well, a computer can solve problems at a far greater speed than the human brain will ever be capable of. All the more since computers are now self-learning, and they learn much faster than a human being does, too. The human consciousness is hampered by far greater limitations than a computer is.”
Grisha jumped to his feet. “The brain is not made from a network of neurons, basic elements, but from a network of molecular supercomputers. This alone completely defeats your notions. But I’m talking about something else. Human consciousness is the only place in the universe where texts can touch one another, interact with one another to produce a new text, new thoughts! This is what ‘in the image and likeness’ is all about. The human being resembles the Creator precisely in this—in the ability to generate new texts.” Grisha knocked on his head rather resoundingly with his fist. “Right in here! This is the only place.”
“Are you quite sure that’s the only place?” Vitya countered, somewhat lazily. “Are you sure that at this stage of evolution a new generation of people won’t emerge, superhuman people, who will represent a sort of hybrid product? Martha’s mother has been living with a pacemaker for ten years; our neighbor Jeremy uses his artificial hand to put drops in his eyes; and I don’t have to tell you the kinds of things that robots are able to do nowadays. The future is taking shape as we speak, and I don’t like to make predictions, but the world has entered a new stage: hybrid evolution is already under way. You understand that human consciousness, allied with the computer, is a qualitatively new product.”
Grisha, who had now finished off half the bottle of vodka, was growing more and more heated.
“Vitya! You fail to understand the most important thing. Excuse me, but you are a technician, a technocrat. Any text is a form of existence for information. Life on earth must be understood as a text. The Divine Text, which is not written by us. The Creator is information. The Divine Spirit is information. The human spirit is a fragment of information. The ‘I’ is a fragment of information. Life is not a means of existence of protein bodies, as Engels thought, but a means of existence of information. Proteins become denatured, but information is indestructible. There is no death. Information is immortal. But this American struggle of yours, the race for speed, leads in the final analysis to a world that belongs to the ones who have the fastest computers. And the instinct for consumption lies at the heart of this race. And self-destruction. Modern-day humankind cannot curb itself, rein itself in. It hungers for dominion, it thirsts for war. It wants to devour everything in its path. Whether America, or Russia, or China. This is a false path. Open your eyes. You’re working for war. In this slaughterhouse, only the Tibetan hermits, and other like-minded people, will survive. A new generation of people will arise out of them, and it will be a new branch in the evolution of sapiens, not amid mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, but amid rusty computers and in the presence of high levels of radiation…”
Here, finally, turning to Vitya, Martha put in her word: “Vitya, he speaks like a prophet.”
In a gesture very familiar to Nora, Vitya rubbed his clean-shaven chin.
“Martha, he’s talking like a Jew. It’s the Jewish passion for reading into a text something that wasn’t there to begin with.”
“What do you mean?” Grisha shouted. “It was written! It was written in very straightforward, down-to-earth words: ‘Hammer your swords into plowshares’! You have to read the texts!”
“I didn’t understand the reference,” Nora whispered to Yurik. “Translation, please.”
He translated.
The more agitated Grisha became, the calmer and merrier Vitya looked.
“Grisha, I did read that text you’re talking about. A long time ago. My wife, Martha, wanted very much for us to get married. I must admit, to this day I don’t understand why it was so important to her. I assumed that it meant putting on a black suit and tie and going to her favorite church, and losing a day’s work for going through the ceremony. But that’s not how it worked out. The priest demanded that I go to catechism classes before we got married. In short, it took loads of time, and I read the Bible. Perhaps for the Hebrews it was the Divine Text, but it seems to me to be a completely archaic document in the present world. Too much cruelty, too much illogic, too many discrepancies and contradictions. It’s not just by chance that for three thousand years Jews have been writing commentaries, interpreting and reinterpreting texts, and turning them inside out, trying to get rid of these contradictions. It seems to me that the proverbial inclination of Jews to scholarship derives precisely from this ancient nitpicking.”