Hunt pursed his lips for an instant. “Why worry? People are going to carry on believing what they want to, anyway. They don’t want truth; they want certainty. You won’t change that. Why burn your life away at both ends trying to?”
She returned a short, resigned nod. “I know. I’m not trying to change anybody. It’s more for me, really—you’ve got to be true to
yourself. I’m just curious about the way the world really is. If it turns out to be not the way a lot of people think, then that’s just too bad. They won’t change reality, either.”
Hunt raised his coffee mug and regarded her over the rim. At least she wasn’t launching into one of the standard recitations that he had heard so often of how people rationalize their being at odds with the world. If she was a misfit, she had come to terms with the fact and was fully at ease with herself. Whatever the subject was that had brought her here, he decided that he had the time and the inclination to listen.
After a few seconds he said, “Maybe you’re in the wrong job. You’re beginning to sound as if you should have been a scientist.”
“You mean, to seek out what objective reality really is?. That’s what scientists do, right?” Her impish raising of an eyebrow and the tongue pushing lightly in her cheek were just quizzical enough to stop short of skepticism.
“Okay. . . well, they’re supposed to, anyway.”
Gina’s eyes widened in mock surprise. “Oh, but they do. You only have to read the textbooks.”
Hunt grinned. He liked this kind of company. “I thought we were talking about reality,” he said.
“But isn’t that what you do?” Gina asked, maintaining the pretense. “Uncover reality?”
“Of course I do. Every scientist knows that he’s different.”
“So you know what’s really out there?”
“Sure.”
Gina moved her legs and sat forward to rest her chin on her hand, staring at him in a play of fascination. “Go on then, tell me. What’s really out there?”
“Photons.”
“That’s it?”
Hunt turned a palm upward. “That’s all that physics can tell you. Everything that’s out there reduces to photons interacting with atoms in nerve endings. That’s it. There isn’t anything else. Just wave packets of whatever, tagged with quantum numbers.”
“Not too exciting,” Gina commented.
“You did ask.”
“So what about the rest of this interesting world that I see?”
“What else do you see?”
She shrugged and motioned vaguely with a hand. “Cabbages and kings. Oceans and mountains, colors and shapes. Places with people in them, doing things that mean something. Where does all that come from?”
“Emergent properties of relationships manifesting themselves at progressively higher levels in a hierarchy of increasing complexity,” he told her, not really expecting her to make much out of it.
“Neural constructs,” she supplied, parrying him. “I create it in my head.”
Hunt raised his eyebrows and nodded his compliments. “Where else? We’ve already agreed what everything from outside is.”
“In the same way that every book that might ever be written is built up from the same twenty-six-letter alphabet. The qualities that we think we perceive aren’t out there in the symbols. The symbols are simply a coding system for triggering what a lifetime of living has written into our nervous systems.”
“You’ve got the idea. Sometimes I think it’s amazing that any two of us ever manage to perceive anything similar at all.”
“I’m not always so sure that we do,” Gina responded.
“Which from your point of view is just as well. If we all saw everything the same, you wouldn’t have anything controversial to write about.” He paused. “I don’t exactly get the feeling that all this is especially new.”
“I already told you, I get curious about things. And in any case, writers read a lot. It’s compulsive. The real reason they write is that it gives them an excuse for doing the research.”
Enough fencing, Hunt decided. She had held her own without getting defensive and turning the thing into a duel. He got up and took the mugs through to the kitchen, along with his breakfast dishes. “So what have you written that brought lynch mobs screaming out of the woodwork?” he asked over his shoulder as he loaded the dishwasher.