“I hope so. They can warm it up for us. God, when was the last time we did it in the yard?”

“Not since Amelia learned about doorknobs.”

“Go have children,” Lola said.

Zwick wandered back and sat at the table and poured himself a couple of fingers of old rum. Paz and Lola joined him.

“Where’s the girlfriend?” Lola asked. “Strangled?”

“Passed out in the hammock. It’s all your fault, Paz, you and your daiquiris and your añejo and your ontological speculations. Did you know that physics is a patriarchal conspiracy to promote a dominant worldview? As is medicine.”

“Well, when you solve the mystery of consciousness it won’t matter,” said Paz. “You can recode everyone’s brain.”

Zwick laughed, a little more elaborately than the comment deserved. “Yeah, and what if that changes physics? Listen, you want me to tell you the secret of the universe?” He mimed a paranoid looking over both shoulders. “Don’t tell anyone. Okay, so let’s say we have these vast pillars of physics, relativity and quantum electrodynamics, and they’re both as elaborately confirmed as anything in the world. Maybetoo elaborately confirmed, out to a part per billion or more. Now, you’re a detective, right? What if I told you that every time there’s been a physical breakthrough, we’ve found a piece of abstract math that’s just tailor-made to fit the new concept? Einsteinjust happened to find Riemann geometry to fit general relativity. And the quantum boysjust happened to find matrix algebra and tensors. And when they first proposed string theory, itjust happened to fit Euler’s beta-function, a two-hundred-year-old piece of math that had never been used for anything before. And Calabi and Yau’s canoodling with hyper-dimensional geometriesjust happened to describe how the extra dimensions required by string theory are curled up. Not to mention the fact that a whole bunch of universal constantsjust happen to lead to a universe where conscious life evolves, and if one of them was changed even a tiny bit there’d be no stars, no planets, no life. What would you say to a case like that?”

“I’d look for a frame-up. Or it might just be a slam dunk.”

“Yes! Butwhich? That’s the killer question. Now let’s say they confirm string theory physically. Let’s say it’s Hawking’s conjecture that black holes radiate outside their event horizons, and we find a black hole small enough to study and string theory predicts that radiation exactly. Then we know it’s true, hallelujah! Physics has the theory of everything at last, except…except what if we made it all up? Observation is a slender reed when you come right down to it. Thousands of astronomers observed the skies and fit their observations into the Ptolemaic system, making loops and littler loops to save the appearances until the whole thing collapsed, but string theory can’t collapse because it’s a theory of everything, everything is already accounted for, and confirmed by a zillion observations. But observation itself is a product of consciousness, andwe don’t know what that is!”

“Why you’re a doc now.”

“Why I’m a doc. So let’s say I’m wrong, John Searle and all of them are wrong, consciousness is not a little trick of the brain, let’s say it’s its own thing, a basic constituent of the universe on a par with space-time and mass, that only occasionally comes to rest in brains but has its own life, maybe down in the Calabi-Yau spaces or out in some connecting universe. That’s your substance dualism, yes? You and Descartes. Then you could have your gods and demons, hey? Your miracles.”

“But you don’t believe that,” said Paz. His throat was suddenly dry, and he poured himself a little of the fruit juice they had laid out for the child.

“Nah, this is just drunk talk. But let’s say itis true we did discover the secret of consciousness, just like we discovered the secret of the physical world, and then there would be these two new pillars of knowledge, the exterior and the interior worlds reaching up to the heavens, and then some Einstein would come along and figure out how they locked together. Then what? We might hear a buzzer, likeennnnnhk! And across the sky in humongous letters, GAME OVER. Or we might learn not only how to observe the quantum world but to actually change it. Actually manipulate the intimate fabric of space-time and mass-energy!”

“This is not going to happen soon, is it?” asked Lola. “Because I just dropped off a big load of dry cleaning.”

Zwick snatched up a candle and held it under his chin, and in a horror-movie voice intoned, “We would be like GODS! Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

And they all laughed, but each was a little uneasy in the laughter, each for a different reason.

Jenny tossed a broken banana into the blender to keep company with the celery, the beets, the spirulina protein powder, and the psyllium husk extract and goosed the HI button. Through the glass top she watched the smoothie come into being, a pinkish gray vortex. Making the midmorning smoothie for Rupert was one of Jenny’s tasks, along with feeding the birds, the cats, the boyfriend, and recently Moie, the Indian; or the Runiya, as she had to remember to call him. But Moie didn’t eat, which worried her, although she herself did not think much of the cuisine at FPA. Rupert thought that it was wrong to consume animals raised for food, and thought that they should set a good diet-for-a-small-planet example, and also establish solidarity with the indigenous people of the rain forests. Rupert got Professor Cooksey to question Moie about his diet, and how to prepare it, but Moie didn’t know about any foodstuffs but meat (in which he included fish, which in turn included turtles, reptiles, and waterfowl) and seemed somewhat affronted to be asked about “women’s things.” Meat and women’s things were how he divided edible substances.

She was supposed to watch him as well, which was not difficult, much easier than minding a kid, for he was in general docile and gentle. In the mornings, when she did her chores, and during the times, as now, when she had to prep and serve food, she parked him in front of the big TV in the living room. They had cable, and she usually punched up a nature program for him. He seemed to like these, and he would also sit solemnly with her while she took inOne Life to Live, her favorite show, although here she had to explain what was going on, because it was kind of hard to get into the plot if you hadn’t been watching for a long time.

She poured the smoothie into the special smoky green glass that Rupert liked to drink it from, placed it on a serving tray, added Luna’s herbal tea and Geli’s coffee and Professor Cooksey’s regular tea, extra-strong with milk, a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a Sprite for herself, and brought it into the office. They were all talking about Moie and what to do about him now that there was this murder of the old Cuban guy, and she was sort of interested in that, so after she’d placed the tray on the table and everybody had their stuff, she sat down in a chair away from the meeting table and listened. That was cool according to Rupert because she wasn’t to think of herself as anything but a full member of the community and not just, like, a maid or anything. Which she mostly thought. She had been an actual maid at one time and so she knew the difference.

Jenny thought that coming into a meeting in the middle of it was a little like coming into the middle ofOne Life to Live, it took a while to figure out what was going on, but you knew the characters, so in a little bit it made sense. Luna was all about using Moie to make a big stink about the people trying to cut down his forest. She had a friend who was a TV producer on Channel Four, and she thought she could get a feature made, and also some of the national enviro groups might pick it up. It was a great story, how this little guy had traveled all that way from South America in a canoe. Geli said, unfortunately he’s not a Cuban, and when Luna asked what that meant, Geli said, he’s illegal, he’s in the country illegally, and if he comes out in public the INS will arrest him and he’ll be stuck in Crome Avenue behind a wire with all the Haitians, and then Luna said, oh, shit, I didn’t think of that, and then added, Rupert, you should talk to your congressman, because Rupert gave a lot of money to this congressman, Jenny always forgot his name, something like Woolite, and he sometimes got him to do stuff, like make a speech about something the FPA was hot on, in the Congress. But Rupert said, maybe that’s not such a good idea at this point until we have clarified about this murder. And he asked Professor Cooksey what he thought, was Moie capable of killing someone that way?