Galatea 2.2: A Novel

Table of Contents

Title Page

BY RICHARD POWERS

Copyright Page

It was like so, but wasn’t.

I lost my thirty-fifth year. We got separated in the confusion of a foreign city where the language was strange and the authorities hostile. It was my own fault. I’d told it, Wait here. I’m just going to change some money. Check on our papers. Don’t move from this spot, no matter what. And chaos chose that moment to hit home.

My other years persist, like those strangers I still embrace in sleep, intimate in five minutes. Some years slip their chrysalis, leaving only a casing to hold their place in my sequence. Each year is a difficult love with whom I’ve played house, declaring, at each clock tick, what it will and won’t put up with.

My thirty-fifth trusted no one. As soon as I said I’d only be a moment, it knew what would happen to us.

Thirty-five shamed me into seeing that I’d gotten everything until then hopelessly wrong. That I could not read even my own years.

At thirty-five, I slipped back into the States. I did not choose either move or destination. I was in no condition to choose anything. For lack of a plan, I took an offer in my old college haunt of U. The job was a plum, my premature reward for a portfolio that now seemed the work of someone else.

I thought the year a paid leave of absence. A visiting position, where I might start again with the recommended nothing. House, meals, office, expenses, and no responsibilities except to live. I clung to the offer without too much reflection.

In fact, I had nowhere else to go. I couldn’t even improvise a fallback.

It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas I’d already absorbed head-on. I’d long ago developed all the needed antibodies. When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.

Nothing else remotely resembled home. Time had turned my birthplace into an exotic theme park. I could not have gotten a visa to live where I’d grown up. And I’d just spent the last seven years in a country that seemed exile already, even while I’d lived there.

But U. I could slink back to, and it would always take me. We were like an old married pair, at 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 literature. 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 adulthood, 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, baroque 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 Countries, 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 degrees 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 rays—artificial intelligence, cognitive science, visualization and signal processing, neurochemistry—sat the culminating prize of consciousness’s long adventure: an owner’s manual for the brain. With its countless discrete and massively parallel subsystems, 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. Transparent man-machine interfaces. Control of protein folding. High-def, digital contrition.

The building teemed with job descriptions: theorists, experimentalists, technicians, magicians. Someone here had a probe attached to every conceivable flicker. One wing swarmed with scientists who proclaimed their transcendence over engineering. Another housed engineers who didn’t even acknowledge the distinction. What one floor banished bred like mold in a nearby quarter.

The Center was big. So big I lost my office twice in the first month, the way you lose a rental in an airport parking garage. Sheer size was the Center’s chief virtue. Even the embarrassment of talking to the same colleague twice faded in a place so huge. In such an expanse, I hoped, one year would be too brief for me to be of any but passing interest to anyone.

What’s more, the complex opened onto virtual space, through a spreading network backbone. I had an office with my name on the door, and a computer cabled into the world web. No one suspected that I had no research group, that I could not tell a field-responsive polymer from a spin glass. I came and went in awful freedom, a complete impostor.

I found the dress-up weirdly pleasant, knowing I could go home nightly to a house both empty and rented. For a long time, I must have been aspiring to just this. Immaculate and cold-booted, a resident alien. Just passing through the old alma mater.

The Center had much to recommend it. Its doors knew me from a distance. They clicked open at the command of an infrared pass card that I didn’t even need to take out of my wallet. I flipped backside to sensors, mandrill style. Anyone reading this by accident or nostalgia a hundred years from now will have to take my word for the novelty.

The parabolic front foyer concentrated sound. I liked to stand at the focus and hear the rush of my own breath, the throb of blood coursing through my veins. I listened to my body’s roar, sounding for all the world like a message left on an answering machine by someone who died later that day.

I tinkered at my new novel, ticking at the machine keys with my door closed and the fluorescent lights doused. My office reveled in state-of-the-art, clean-room efficiency. The perfect place to tuck my millennial bedtime story in for the night. I’d click a radio button on my screen and eighteen months of work waited for me by the time I hiked upstairs to the network laser.

I browsed the world web. I fished it from my node on a building host that served up more megabits a second than I could request. By keying in short electronic addresses, I connected to machines all over the face of the earth. The web: yet another total disorientation that became status quo without anyone realizing it.

The snap of a finger, a satellite uplink, and I sat conversing with a mainframe in my old coal-mining ex-hometown seven time zones away. I could read the evensong schedule from off a digital valet in Cambridge, download Maurya painting, or make a Cook’s tour of New Zealand. In seconds, I could scroll through dinner menus in languages I could not even identify. From my chair in the virgin Center, I revisited every city I’d ever spent time in and hundreds I would never get around to visiting in this life.

The town had been knitted into a loose-weave, global network in my absence. The web seemed to be self-assembling. Endless local investigations linked up with each other like germs of ice crystal merging to fill a glass pane.

The web overwhelmed me. I found it easier to believe that the box in Pakistan I chatted with was being dummied up in the other end of the building. I didn’t know how my round-the-world jaunts were being billed, or if they were billed at all.

For a while, I felt a low-grade thrill at being alive in the moment when this unprecedented thing congealed. But after weeks of jet-setting around the hypermap, I began to see the web as just the latest term in an ancient polynomial expansion. Each nick on the time line spit out some fitful precursor. Everyone who ever lived had lived at a moment of equal astonishment.

The web had been a long while in linking up. It, too, was just a stopgap stage in a master plan drawn up on the back of the brain’s envelope. A bit of improvised whittling, forever a step shy. A provisional pontoon in that rough pencil sketch for final triumph over space and time.

I explored the world’s first network in embryo. After days of disappearing children, I spent my nights playing in the greatest virtual sandbox yet built. I’d stumbled upon a stack of free travel vouchers. I put up in U., but I resided elsewhere. I thought: a person might be able to make a life in all that etherspace.

Each day produced new improbabilities. I searched card catalogs in Kyoto or book reports from Bombay. German soccer scores and Alaskan aurora sightings filled my office E-mail pouch.

I eavesdropped on international discussion groups, ongoing, interactive Scheherazades that covered every imaginable theme from arms control to electronic erotica. Notefile threads split and proliferated in meiosis. Debates flowed without beginning or end, through tributaries and meanderings, responses to responses to responses. Inexhaustible protagonists from every time zone posted to the continuous forum a dozen or more times a day.

Alone in my office, blanketed by the hum of the Center, I felt like a boy happening onto a copy of the Odyssey in a backwater valley library. I wanted to rush out into the hall and announce my each discovery. But who could I tell? Those lonely souls who stood most to gain would only shake their heads, dazed, locked out on every level. Those who had the wherewithal to see what the fuss was about had already habituated to the inconceivable.

Advanced science, of course, profited enormously from the web. The groups at the Center could now read journal articles months before they hit print. The data Autobahns had no speed limit. They plunked one in front of any results on earth before you could read the Connect. Researchers peered into colleagues’ labs on other continents, in real time. They shared data in 3D, as they gathered it.

On all sides of my cubicle, experimenters scoured the nodes. The net reduced duplication of effort and helped pinpoint crucial results they otherwise might have missed altogether. Instant telemessaging produced an efficiency that fed back into steeper invention. And invention accelerated the universal linkup.

But the longer I lurked, the sadder the holiday became. People who used the web turned strange. In public panels, they disguised their sexes, their ages, their names. They logged on to the electronic fray, adopting every violent persona but their own. They whizzed binary files at each other from across the planet, the same planet where impoverished villages looked upon a ball-point pen with wonder. The web began to seem a vast, silent stock exchange trading in ever more anonymous and hostile pen pals.

The web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger and faster. When relentless intelligence finally completed its program, when the terminal drop box brought the last barefoot, abused child on line and everyone could at last say anything instantly to everyone else in existence, it seemed to me we’d still have nothing to say to each other and many more ways not to say it.

Yet I could not log off. My network sessions, all that fall, grew longer and more frequent. I began to think of myself in the virtual third person, as that disembodied world-web address: rsp@center.visitor.edu.

How long could I show up at the Center and produce nothing of use to anyone? The productivity problem. The pure-research problem. The inspiration, the blind-trust problem. I could drift without limit and still not be reprimanded. I had the year gratis. I might do nothing but prime the pump, rest and recharge, and still I would not ruffle so much as a mite’s mood where it camped out on the eyelash of the emergent digital oversoul.

I meant to milk the new book for as many weeks of touch-up as I could get away with. Past that point I tried not to speculate. Three times before, the end of a long project had kicked off the start of another. I’d mastered the art of surviving narrative whiplash. No reason, in theory, why I couldn’t regroup again. Go on and work forever.

But this time felt different. This time, after I paid my Pied Piper account, nothing waited for me on the far side of story’s gaping mountain. Nothing but irremediable Things As They Are.

What little diversionary work remained I dragged out for all it was worth. Two Kbytes of new text or four of reasonable revision honorably discharged me of the day. Beyond that, I could indulge my remaining hours in good faith. A page and a half freed me to go and do as I liked.

Mostly, I liked to haunt the Center after hours. At night, the building thinned almost to empty. The community of night research emitted a sober thrill. The handful of sallow, animated faces at that hour could not help but be there. Their inquiries had them hooked, as levered to the intermittent payoffs as their lab animals. They piloted the halls, feverish, close to breakthrough, indifferent to clock time. They weaved from lab to lab in directed distraction, eyes combing every visual field but the corridors down which they moved.

Except for these addicts of the verifiable, I had the place to myself. That alone was worth coming in for: fifty million dollars of real estate filled with several hundred million in instruments, boxes that glowed with subdued purpose, abandoned like an electronic Rapture. No one could have a more profound sense of history than a night custodian of such a building.

Night brought open-endedness to the place. Through the machine on my desk, I could disappear down the coaxial rabbit hole to any port of call. I had a phone I could dial out on but which never rang. I had a white board and bright pastel markers that wiped off without a trace. I amused myself by writing out, in different colors, as many first lines of books as I could remember. Now and then I cheated, verifying them on the web.

These nights were dead with exhilaration. Like battening down in the face of a major maritime storm. All I could do was stock the mental candles and wait.

On such a night, I met Lentz. From my first glimpse, he seemed the person I’d come back to U. to meet. While I stood by, this man prototyped the thing humanity has been after from out of the starting block. In the year I knew him, Philip Lentz would bring a life back from the dead.

The night in question, I’d diverted myself so successfully with bursts of null activity that I found myself still in the building well past midnight. I was prowling the corridors on the floor above my office. I stood outside a conference center, reading a posterboard entitled Compliance of Neuronal Growth over Semiconductor Substrate. Someone had encouraged nerve cells to connect themselves in clean, geometric, living chips. And had electron microscopy shots to prove it.

I felt my perfect solitude. A few fluorescent highlights here and there kept alive the odd captive plant. As I do when I’m alone, I hummed to myself. Only now, in the distance, I began to hear the music I’d been humming. Mozart, the Clarinet Concerto, middle movement. The one that C. had thought the most pained palliative in creation.

Here, in the deserted, empirical dark, years too late, I heard that she was right. In the Center, where no birds sang, this sound, slowed to a near stop, resigned all hope of ever saying just what its resignation carried. At this impossible hour, when even the most inexorable researchers had gone home to whatever family they could muster for themselves, only music stayed behind to prove the ravishing irrelevance of research.

The clarinet and orchestra exchanged phrases, elaborating on the ongoing expansion, unfolding, inhaling beyond capacity like the lungs of a patriarch wedging open the air after being told of the death of his last great-grandchild. The endless phrase spoke of how you reach an age when anything you might answer would not be worth asking.

Who in all this restless measurement had time for so infinite an aside? The late-night auditor, whoever he was, must have thought he listened alone. Even the cleaning crew had gone. The earliest hard-core hackers would not stumble in to their predawn keyboarding for another two hours.

Ordinarily, any sound would have driven me to an emergency exit. Now I gravitated to the source, audiotropic, to secure the forsaken signal.

The tune grew more real. It approached the asymptote of live performance. The next turn of the corridor maze would flush out a covey of tuxedoed instrumentalists. The thread of sound led me to an office down a spur hallway I did not know existed. The cell door stood wide open. The phrase issued from it as if from the wellspring of all improvisation.

The music’s hopeless peace emboldened me. I came alongside the door and looked in. Except for 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 produced 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 infinitesimal 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 resolve, 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 interstellar 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 paralyzing simplicity. That perfect phrase breathed in and out just as before, steeped in stabbing acceptance. But something different unfolded 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. Acknowledgment. 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 economies 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 retirement from software, I’d made a living by writing code. But a neural net, I learned in browsing the web, resembled nothing I’d ever programmed in my coding days. Neural networkers no longer wrote out procedures or specified machine behaviors. They dispensed with comprehensive flowcharts and instructions. Rather, they used a mass of separate processors to simulate connected brain cells. They taught communities of these independent, decision-making units how to modify their own connections. Then they stepped back and watched their synthetic neurons sort and associate external stimuli.

Each of these neurodes connected to several others, perhaps even to all other neurodes in the net. When one fired, it sent a signal down along its variously weighted links. A receiving neurode added this signal’s weight to its other continuous inputs. It tested the composite signal, sometimes with fuzzy logic, against a shifting threshold. Fire or not? Surprises emerged with scaling up the switchboard.

Nowhere did the programmer determine the outcome. She wrote no algorithm. The decisions of these simulated cells arose from their own internal and continuously changing states.

Each decision to fire sent a new signal rippling through the electronic net. More: firings looped back into the net, resetting the signal weights and firing thresholds. The tide of firings bound the whole chaotically together. By strengthening or weakening its own synapses, the tangle of junctions could remember. At grosser levels, the net mimicked and—who knew?—perhaps reenacted associative learning.

Neural networkers grouped their squads of faked-up cells together in layers. An input layer fronted on the boundless outdoors. Across the connective brambles, an opposite squad formed the door where the ghost in the machine got out. Between these, the tool kit of simulated thought. In the so-called hidden layers lay all the knotted space where the net, and networkers like Lentz, associated.

The field went by the nickname of connectionism. Piqued, I subscribed to the web’s discussion group on the subject. Reading made good counterpoint to my final rewrite. It was also a great day-waster and delaying tactic. Studying postponed the time when I’d no longer have any rewrite to counterpoint.

Now, whenever I logged on to the system, a new round of notes on the topic greeted me from all quarters. Several of my fellow visitors at the Center took part, firing messages back and forth to intercontinental colleagues. But unless this Lentz signed on with a pseudonym, he seemed to cut a wide side step around the citizens band.

I followed the exchange. The regulars took on personalities. The Danish renegade. The Berkeley genius provocateur. Slow and Steady, respected co-authors, in constant battle with their archrival, Flash-in-the-Pan. Some speculated. Others graciously deflated. I saw myself as a character in this endless professional convention: the Literary Lurker. Novice symposium dabbler, who no one knew was there. But even lurking left a signature.

I learned that networks were not even programmed, in so many words. They were trained. Repeated inputs and parental feedback created an association and burned it in. Reading that fact tripped an association in me. The man had been sitting in his office after midnight, playing the same five minutes of Mozart again and again to an otherwise empty building. To a bank of machines.

This Lentz, I reasoned, had a neural network buried in that mountain of equipment. One that he was training to recognize beauty. One that would tell him, after repeated listenings, how that simple reed breathing made and unmade the shifting signal weights that triggered souls.

Some days later, the beak thrust itself into my office without knocking. Dr. Lentz stood upright even more precariously than he reclined. Even standing still, he listed like a marionette on a catamaran, my office door handle his rudder. Again the summer suit, the last scientist not giving congressional evidence to wear one. His skin had the pallor of a sixties educational TV host. He looked as if he’d taken self-tanning cream orally.

Reclusive novelist living in the Netherlands? His voice held more accusation than question. An allusion to a photo caption that had run in a major news weekly. I’d been captured in front of a stand of palms imported into the Sonora. The text beneath gave my life in thumbnail, now wrong on all three counts.

I launched my screen saver, to blot the incriminating text on my tube. He might have read it, even from his angle. Those eyes seemed set out on stalks.

Yep. That’s me.

"Yep? This is ‘dazzlingly brilliant’? So tell me. What is it about the Dutch, anyway?"

Excuse me?

They hang around your writing like dung beetles around a cholera ward. At least a cameo appearance in every book you’ve written. I mean: fifteen million tulip-sucking, clog-carving water wizards. So what? That’s less than the population of greater New York.

He’d done his homework. And wanted me to know.

Search me, I countered. Accident. Pure coincidence.

Nonsense. Fiction doesn’t permit accident. And what little coincidence it does put up with is far from pure. Why don’t you write about real countries? The whole global community is out there, chain-dragging on its own economic exhaust pipe. It’s North against South, you know. Haves versus have-nots. How about a swing through the tropics? The lands of the 6 percent population growths and the two-hundred-dollar-a-year incomes?

I gestured toward the hard disk on my desk where my latest sat, all but finished. There’s a bit in the new one …

He waved me off. Doubtless the Dutch are in attendance as well.

Two words, right at the end. The little Frank girl’s Dear Kitty. He gloated. I looked away.

You and your precious bourgeois queendoms. Why should I care? Why should I pay twenty-five dollars—

Only thirteen in paperback. The joke fell flat. At that point I would have given him the complete works at cost, to get him out of my office.

Twenty-five dollars to read about a negligible nation whose unit of currency sounds like something you’d use to pay the tinker or cobbler.

Well, they did rule the world once.

For what—twenty years? The Golden Age. He paced in place. The eye-darting edginess started to get on my nerves. I shoved the spare chair at him. He sat, smirking.

The great middlemen, your Dutchmen. Bought and sold all races, colors, and creeds. Tell me. How does it feel to live in a country that peaked three centuries ago?

I haven’t a clue. I hadn’t yet decided how it felt to grow up in a country that peaked three years before I tried to bail out.

I didn’t relish the idea of an insult match with a stranger. Besides, I’d already reached the same conclusion he had, this cognitive economist who had no more than browsed my novels, standing in front of the fiction Ps at the University bookstore. He was right. It was time to give the Dutch a rest. After my latest, I planned to put them down for the count.

But then, my plan for the next time out was to pack in everything. Not just the exotic bits, the color travelogue. I meant to retire my whole mother tongue.

In the meantime, I figured I might at least bait this scientist. I wasn’t doing anything else that afternoon anyway. Nothing but writing.

They’ve had more than their share of world-class painters and composers, for a negligible country.

"Oh, please, Mr. Powers. European-class. The world, it may stun you to learn, is predominantly black-haired. A plurality of those live without adequate shelter and would use The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp as a canvas roof patch if they could."

And your Mozart? I don’t usually like cheap counterattacks, but the man asked for it.

He shrugged. The piece happened to be handy. A small fraction of the available repertoire. Replaceable, I assure you. He stood and strode to my whiteboard. Without asking, he erased the text I’d written there and began to draw a matrix of hollow boxes. All right. I’ll grant you the pretty pictures and a few good tunes. But they’ve never amounted to much in the novel-writing department, have they?

That’s the fault of translation.

Not the limits of that expectorant Low German dialect? An orthography to write home about. And crikey! How do you deal with that syntax? An even by native speakers not until the ultimate grammatical arrival capable of being unraveled word order that one’s brain in ever more excruciatingly elaborate cortical knots trivially can tie.

His burlesque was note-perfect. He tore it off, at tempo. It chilled me. How much homework had the man done? Could a cognitive linguist parody a language he didn’t speak? I didn’t want to know. I wouldn’t have answered him in kind then, even if he switched over.

I still dreamed in that language. It ruined me for English. Gone for over half a year, I still saw the spire of the Utrecht Dom