Slavery is an alien state to me; those few I have seen in Paris are novelties: as a society we practice the subtler oppressions of seigneury. God forfend that this plague of draft animals should cross to France! Not a day passes that we are not passed by flotillas of tethered rafts laden to the waterline with bound slaves: men, women, children, all red, all naked as innocent Adam and Eve. This is a monstrous traffic. The prices at Belém do Pará are insultingly low; the Indian has not our resistance to diseases, and life on the engenhos is so hard and dispiriting few see more than five years — few desire more than five years. This economy serves the senhores de engenhos well: a slave pays for himself in two cruelly hard sugar harvests; everything after that is profit. In five years the owner has returned double on his investment, so there is no incentive not to work them to death. I am told many Indians simply put an end to themselves rather than face such an existence. Yet the supply of red flesh up the great river is seemingly as endless as its flow of waters: whole nations are being “descended,” as the euphemism runs here.

What may I tell you of my traveling companion? For a start, he is more chaperone than traveling companion: I am in no doubt whatsoever that his advent alone secured my permission to travel upriver, the usefulness of my researches to the mercantile Portuguese being balanced against their sensitivities at being tenuous owners of a vast, largely unmapped, and almost wholly undefended territory that our kingdom has historically viewed with envy. No matter, it is the least of incivilities; indeed, it is almost a flattery that they consider me so important a spy that they have placed me under the watchfullness of as extraordinary a man as Father Quinn, SJ.

You know well my scant regard for the religious, but every so often one meets a member in holy orders of such force of personality, such qualities and charisms that one is forced to speculate, what could possibly have moved this man to take his vows? Luis Quinn is surely one of these. Of an Old Catholic family dispossessed of its lands and forced into the port trade by the accesssion of the House of Orange, he is a great bear of a man — Irish, a race of lumbering, uncouth giants much given to brooding and the taking of slights and offenses — yet in the Ver-o-Peso, when we fought in mock duel, he moved with a grace, an energy and economy that I have never seen in any of his compatriots, and also an unregenerate ferocity that leads me to speculate what may have led him to his vow and habit.

He is an intelligent man. I have never met a Jesuit who was not at worst a pleasant conversationalist, at best a fine intellectual spar. Languages I have always found peculiarly broadeningtro the mind: to speak is to think; language is culture. Father Quinn speaks his native Irish in two dialects, the western and the northern; Latin and Greek of course; English; Spanish; French; Portuguese; Italian; can get by in Moroccan Arabic and claims to have taught himself the Tupi lingua geral, which is more commonly spoken than Portuguese on these waters, on the crossing from Lisbon. How that rowdy family of voices must shape the interior of a man’s skull is a fine speculation.

Last night, in the long and tedious dark that falls so early and swift in these latitudes, I showed him the working model of the Governing Engine. I demonstrated how the chain of cards fed from the hopper and thus governed the lifting patterns of the weft harnesses in the loom. “Thus the most commplicated of brocades can be simply rendered as a series of holes or solids in the card: mathematically, substance or absence, ones or nulls. In a sense, an entire weave of cloth can be reduced to a single chain of figures: ones and zeroes.” He handled the device and toyed intelligently with the wooden mechanism, observing how the pegs on the riser-heads fell into the holes and held the weft down, while the solid card pressed down on those same pins and caused the harnesses to rise.

“I can see how it might be possible to use such a set of cards to playa program in a musical automaton,” he said perspicaciously. “It is a much more flexible system than the pins on musical boxes; one mechanism could play any piece that could be rendered in holes and solids — ones and nulls, as you suggest. One of those new-fashioned fortepianos would be an ideal instrument, being not so far from a loom in its construction. A loom of music, one might say.”

I speculated then of other tasks that might benefit from the automotivation of the Governing Engine: arithmetical calculation was easily simplified, and Jean-Baptiste, whose touch of genius the punched card was, developed a number of card-sets that could perform mathematical computations as complex as factorization and deriving square roots, notoriously cumbersome and time-consuming.

“I must confess that this thought fills me with intellectual excitement,” I said to Quinn as we stood by Fé em Deus’s stern rail, taking what cool the evening offered. “If such straightforward arithmetic computations can be reduced to a string of ones and nulls, might not all mathematics be ultimately reducible to the same basic code? The great Newton’s laws of motion, his rules for the gravitational forces that order the physical universe, these too may be simply reduced to ones and zeroes, something and nothing. Might this simple machine — given a sufficiently large stack of properly coded cards — be capable of rendering the entire universe itself? A universal governor?”

I shall not soon forget his reply: “Your words come close to blasphemy there, friend.” To him, I was reducing the vast created order, and everything in it, to something even less than Newton’s dumb mechanism, to a mere string of somethings and nothings. That Earth and the heavens could be governed, in effect, ex nihilo — by nulls, by the absence of God-was not lost on this acute man. He said, “Mathematics is the product of the mind, not the mind of mathematics, and all creations of the perfection of God.”

I should have understood that he was offering me a space in which to pause, even to withdraw from what he saw as the logical and, to him, heretical consequences of my speculation. Bur the wide vistas of mental abstraction have always called me on, to run like a horse turned loose after years at the mill; or perhaps the mad, dying horses of Brazil? I asked him to consider the auto-motive fortepiano: the same mechanism that turned digits on the cards into notes could be reversed, encoding the strokes of the keys into marks on a card, to be punched into holes. Thus we could obtain an exact record of a player’s performance at that moment and no other; in effect, the very thoughts and intents of Mr. Handel or Father Vivaldi preserved forever. This record could be copied many times, as a book is printed, a permanent memory of a performance, not subject to the frailties and imaginings of human memory. A model of part of mind: I surmised that within a very few years of the Governing Engine’s general acceptance into the world of industry, ways would be found to record and code other aspects of the human mind.

“Then thank God that our souls are more than mere numbers,” Quinn said. He hefted the Governing Engine and for an instant I feared he might fling it into the river. He set it down on the deck as he might a colicky child. “A model of a model of a mind. Your engine, M. Falcon, will make slaves of us all.”

And so it is that human intelligence is the slave of doctrine, shackled and sold as utterly as any of the wretches that drift past us on those waterlogged slave rafts. The divine is invoked and there can be no more argument. Damnable Jesuit condescension! The arrogance of his assumption to possess all truth, that no debate need be entered into for I could only be correct insofar as I concurred with his doctrine. We spoke no more that night: we retired to our hammocks, he to banish the mosquitoes with the fumes of the powerful cigars he favors, I to rage and draw up arguments and counterblasts, exposing follies and inanities. It will be fruitless; truth is not ours to discover; it is what is revealed. It angers me to see a man of such gifts and intellectual grasp reduced to the state of child by the dogma of his order.