"Playground"

[fiefoe]

Richard Powers' recent novel doesn't quite gel for me. I know how troubled Rafi is, but to cut off Todd over revealing his secret just seems too drastic.

• * Little pellets were dropping through the air and landing on the grass with a faint click. They stuck to the ends of the frozen blades like white, wet flowers. I hadn’t even noticed. Nor had Rafi. Chicago boys, raised on the lake effect.
  Ina had never seen anything like it. She was watching bits of eggshell fall from the sky to make the Earth.
• Fifteen minutes after their brief service, Ina’s daughter was skipping down to the waves again, finding new jewels, as if death by plastic ingestion were just another inscrutable myth, as mysterious as a god huddled up in a spinning egg before the beginning of the world.
• One continuous war game between the two of them dominated my entire childhood. Their tournament was driven as much by lust as by hatred, and each of them took their different superpowers into the fray. My father: the strength of mania. My mother: the cunning of the downtrodden.
• A warrior of the open-outcry system, he stood in the heart of the octagon as the furious waves of capitalism crashed all around him. Casting a cold eye on others’ fears and turning them to a profit, his brain knew no difference between thrill and stress.
• Which Māui—whether the Hawaiian, the Tahitian, the Māorian, the Samoan, the Tongan, the fire-bringer, the sun-stopper, the magic fishhook maker, or the wormy rapist of goddesses—she wasn’t quite sure.
• There was only one way of making a two or a twelve, but six ways to roll a seven. The maker of the world whispered that secret to me, and it changed everything. <> From that moment, the board turned into a seething hive, where the pitfalls and promise of each location rose and fell with each move.
• He was as happily underemployed as anyone in French Polynesia. His own son’s greatest crisis was that his father refused to let him go crabbing on the pinnacles of the old phosphate mines at night. It seemed like a step upward on the ladder of psychic trauma. Despite every lesson life had ever taught him, Rafi Young found himself believing at times that islands could sometimes heal.
  But Ina’s own nightmare triggered his dream again that night. While his wife held on to his back in the dark, Rafi dreamed through his first day of school as it had always gone. The orange cap and coat. The self-organizing brutality of first-graders. The cut arms. The stupid lie. His sister’s pleading. His father’s violent self-defense. The wreck of his family, laid at his feet.
• Fish whose barrel heads were transparent, / The news caught Hone on the chin.
• But the book insisted that even the oddest fish was still my first cousin, compared to the other beings down there. The ocean teemed with primordial life—monsters left behind from evolution’s oldest back alleys—ring-shaped, tube-shaped, shapeless, impossible plant-animal mash-ups with no right to exist, ...  I had the ocean. From then on, there was nothing for me but the endlessly inventive, unfathomable deep.
• For fifty million more years, mats of cyanobacteria fed on sunlight in the shallow ponds of this creature-created island. The energy they harvested went into all of life’s enterprises. One of these processes involved extracting phosphate from seawater and sequestering it in the layers of the bacteria’s own cells. As those cells died, the island’s pools filled up with phosphates.
• * The course of civilization is carved in ocean currents. Where sea layers mix, where rains travel or wastelands spread, where great upwellings bring deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters to the energy-bathed surface and fish go mad with fecundity, where soils turn fertile or anemic, where temperatures turn habitable or harsh, where trade routes flourish or fail: all this the global ocean engine determines. The fate of continents is written in water. And sometimes great cities owe their existence to tiny ocean islands.
• * Humanity’s suite of hockey-stick graphs required phosphate rock. Makatea helped Homo sapiens subdue the Earth. But in the process, the island was consumed. <> Everyone needs to eat, but few people are aware of who sets the table. Makatea l’Oublié, a few books call it: Makatea the Forgotten. But that’s a misnomer. You can’t forget what you never knew.
• They’d tour the ruined towns lost to the jungle and marvel at what the island had once been. In those two days, the children would spend like gods, and all the local boats would go up. Then they’d reboard their massive catamaran and head off on their next adventure, somewhere in the wide and lucky regions that composed their playground.
• “But isn’t it . . . just more colonialism?” <> Hone grinned and whistled like a sandpiper at the fanciest word ever to come from his old schoolmate’s mouth. “For us? Always. Everything. My father just tried to pick the colonizers who offered the best terms.”
• the mayor, head down and praying to the angels (because he couldn’t make eye contact with the Virgin Mary, whose perfection embarrassed him), saying, “It’s still adultery, isn’t it? Even if my wife says it’s okay?” <> To his astonishment, the angels said, Emergency adultery.
• To talk to the Widow about such a deep concern would be true infidelity to Roti. But he could not talk to Roti about the crisis, either. She would simply tell him to do what he knew in his heart was right.
• * Power, the mayor decided, was an isolating thing, especially when power was powerless.
• * One of those creatures had brought her to this reef, a massive-brained, flattened torpedo with a skeleton half the density of bone, a fish who achieved stunning speeds with one beat of its huge wings, who put its truck-sized body through graceful loop-de-loops, grazed in geometric formations, lofted its thousands of pounds into the air, and played in curiosity with the world around it as with a toy. A creature born swimming, and swimming ceaselessly every moment of its life, even as it slept.
• The girl was trapped now in a failing body, hammered thin by use,
• He drifted like a stealth jet in the world’s slowest flight. Impossible not to see him as a gigantic, oceangoing bird flying through the water. No wonder that the people of these islands had long considered these creatures sacred—the spirit guardians and promoters of grace, wisdom, and flow. From underneath, looking up into the filtered sun, she found the Loner’s pale belly surprisingly hard to make out—a ghost as diffuse as his black dorsal silhouette would appear to anyone looking down on him through the darkening waves. Countershading—Thayer’s law: a trick that fish had used for the last hundred and fifty million years to make themselves disappear both into and against the light.
• * She had spent too many decades of close observation to be cowed any longer by the prohibition against anthropomorphism. What began, centuries ago, as a healthy safeguard against projection had become an insidious contributor to human exceptionalism, the belief that nothing else on Earth was like us in any way.
• Evelyne steadied herself as if for a pick-and-roll, and as the fish passed by once more above her, she spoke into her mouthpiece, “Your move!” <> The Loner caught the bubbles of her words under one fin and held them there for as long as he could. Evelyne could almost hear the creature echo the giggle that tore out of her. Nothing in life matched a game of catch between cousins whose last common ancestor had lived 440 million years ago.
• Whenever Rafi stayed at his father’s there were forced marches of reading.
• But during reading, he was safest of all. His Oz, his Narnia. Reading left him untouchable on a raft in the middle of an ocean of bright words.
• “Listen. Rafi. I’m sorry I used to get angry at you. I thought you were a coward. I didn’t know you couldn’t see the ball.”
  Something came over the boy. Someone else’s idea. “I am a coward.”
  His father’s face collapsed. Euphoria flooded through Rafi, as never before.
  “I don’t like baseball. I don’t like getting stronger or learning how to fight. I just like reading.”
  The feeling was fantastic. Like beating the man at checkers. Like whupping him at his own invented game.
• But in the unraveling game of childhood, every week pushed Rafi Young further into enemy territory. His life as a permanent infiltrator had begun.
• * He just wanted to read until he discovered where all the pain of the world came from.
• he began to feel that he’d been preparing his whole life for this one, ridiculous, thrilling long shot. <> The comprehensive exam was more challenging than any he’d taken. But he ran through the questions like a champion contestant on an afternoon game show. His nervousness disappeared, and the rare chance to flex his skills turned into the only blood sport he’d ever enjoyed playing.
• What is the most important quality any person could possess? _ Without the ability to feel sad, a person could not be kind or thoughtful, because you wouldn’t care or know how anybody else feels. Without sadness, you would never learn anything from history. Sadness is the key to loving what you love and to becoming better than you were. A person who never felt sad would be a monster. <> In two short hours, he had his introduction, his three examples, and his summary—one thousand words. The argument was strange. But it felt lively and true, and the words didn’t make him sick to read.
• Rafi watched Moody Stepdad read the letter. The man’s posture alone made a vacuum of the room.
• serious-looking books I’d never heard of. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance one week and The Screwtape Letters the next. I’d spy on the titles, then go to the library to look them up. I got a fifth of my education that year from a guy I didn’t even know. <> I learned his name: the banal, WASPy surname, the given name rich with Black Muslim resistance.
• GET VERTIGO REMEMBERING everything that happened to us in those years at Ignatius, as adulthood insinuated itself into our adolescent bodies. I see myself standing in front of those twenty-foot tall, massive oak front doors with the embossed lion’s head, hearing the teenage frenzy behind them waiting for me as I pulled them open. We were living that epic work in progress, watching it unfold in front of us, move by adolescent move. <> The mess of first sex, my timid experiments with pot, the free-for-all of social jockeying, all the changing games of prestige, self-invention, and group loyalty: life would never again be so saturated in possibility... Only the love that I bore Rafi Young still needs replaying, before the game is done.
• Tailliez showed Diolé a stanza from Rimbaud’s Le Bateau Ivre: I dreamed of the green night with dazzled snow, / To kiss rising slowly in the eyes of the seas, / The circulation of astounding sap, / And the yellow and blue awakening of the / singing phosphors!
  Dazzled snows: yes. The constant white fall of living particles downward through the water column. The circulation of astounding sap. The singing phosphors! She had heard and seen them both. How did the poet know?
• Her parents couldn’t grasp how the timid kid who chewed her lips and fretted her cardigans to spaghetti had become a felon of self-assertion in a few short years. But to Evie, the metamorphosis felt as simple as breathing. Taciturnity was just desire that hadn’t yet blossomed.
• “Where do you come down on continental drift?” <> The snare was obvious, even before it was sprung. The most controversial topic in all the earth sciences had been a hot war long before her lecture-hall shoot-out back at Duke. In the two years since then, her suspicions about consensual wisdom had only deepened.
• Dactylopus: The fingered dragonet was so bizarre, so implausible, so grotesque, so beautiful, she could barely credit it. Shocking blue spots on the leading spikes of its dorsal fin waved above the twin bulge of eyes. Its blood-orange lips were the color of her hair, at least when her hair was clean. Its skin was the perfect, mottled match to the pebbled bed it dragged across. A dragonet, yes, with further blue stripes adding a touch of hideous elegance to its flamboyant tail. She was this fish—a spindly horror in a sweet shirtwaist dress.
• Her eyes would not stop shuttering, like the eyes of a mudskipper transiting from water to land.
• She hung suspended in the middle of reefs that mounded up in pinnacles, domes, turrets, and terraces. She was a powerless angel hovering above a metropolis built by billions of architects almost too small to see. At night, with underwater lights, when the coral polyps came out to feed, the reef boiled over with surreal purpose, a billion different psychedelic missions, all dependent on each other.
• “Of course you’d choose the ocean. Any sane person would.” <> She felt a calm like the stilled winds at the equator. She took his wrist and cradled it.
• No human being knew what life on Earth really looked like. How could they? They lived on the land, in the marginal kingdom of aberrant outliers. All the forests and savannas and wetlands and deserts and grasslands on all the continents were just afterthoughts, ancillaries to the Earth’s main stage.
• * Beaulieu was happy to ascribe to Wai Temauri skills that rivaled the fish and birds. His people had done a thing no modern navigator could match. His ancestors had slid into the immensity of the Pacific in tiny, hand-paddled canoes, without astrolabes or lenses, without compasses, with no maps or charts except those in their heads. Even without writing, they had dispersed through an ocean larger than all the continents combined and settled every inhabitable speck of land in it, specks scattered like stars in a mostly empty universe. And they had leapt across this vastness so fast that islanders spoke languages that could still be understood by distant kin thousands of miles away. The world’s greatest seafarers still shared common myths, common tools, common customs, practices, and beliefs.
• * The fact saddened Evelyne. Still, she was at peace with it. Memory should be vise-like in youth when the emerging navigator needed it most. But no one ever survived into old age who couldn’t open that vise and let much of their hard-gripped facts go free. Evelyne simply hoped that the girl might live long enough to grow as forgetful as she needed to be. As forgetful and reconciled to the horror of life as Evelyne herself had grown.
• A few weeks later, in humanities class, as Father Kelly was declaiming e. e. cummings’s “somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond” for the entire numbed class, I turned around to roll my eyes at Rafi in the row behind me. His eyes were wet and he was mouthing along with the words.
   (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/153877/somewhere-i-have-never-travelledgladly-beyond,
  nobody, not even the rain,has such small hands)
• * Go: The vast, empty patches of intersections seemed arbitrary. Stones that I thought were on the outside line of a battle flipped and were suddenly on the inside of another, larger war. And this was going on in a dozen different board locations at the same time. The grid of the board became the streets and neighborhoods of Chicago. Some local race war in the blocks of Pilsen was going to unfold until it shook the blocks of Elk Grove to their foundations. How could a person hope to command so many subtle and flickering battles all at once?
• partly to signal to him in their own idiolalia that he could stop working for the day... Ina couldn’t always tell the difference between his defeat and his stoicism. Something to do with his upbringing, in a city he hated and a family he couldn’t save.
• * But my little experiment in empowering and connecting people got away from me twenty years ago. I haven’t been running it for years. No one has. It’s a living system, with its own agenda. Every business beyond a certain size grows its own hive mind. The company itself will find a person who can implement its collective will. And the people at the helm will be convinced of their own agency, just as I was. <> Add that to your table of definitions for what it means to be a human being. We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we’re desolate when that’s what they become.
• Queen: She had over a thousand songs in her memory to help her up the rise. Genealogy songs and geography songs and historical epics and classic fa’atara odes. Some of them were hers but most were only on loan from the past,
• Nine people Palila Tepa worked with on Hao and Moruroa got cancer, some worse than hers. One hundred thousand islanders breathed the fallout. One hundred thousand people knowingly exposed to repeated radiation, and sixty-three got checks.
• * the mayor arrived. The poor man looked beyond beset. He carried a folder in one hand, his phone in the other, and a century and a half of colonial false consciousness on his shoulders.
• And so, the benchmark of human intelligence shifted from chess to Go. Go required deep intuition, creativity, psychological insight, a spark of indefinable genius. In short: all the things that chess was supposed to have possessed just a few years before. All the things machines would never be able to do. <> Of all the things we humans excel at, moving the goalposts may be our best trick. The moment advanced AIs get good at that, they’ll have passed the real Turing test.
• We’d sit together up in the turret near the widow’s walk, eating Space Food Sticks and talking French Existentialism. “You know what we are?” he said, sipping his favorite Life Savers soda. “Condemned to freedom. Sisyphus really is happy, brother. Give or take.”
• I spied the title from across the room: The Philosophy of the Common Task, by Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov... “And one day, through a mix of genetics, neurology, information theory, and simulation—all things that Fyodorov intuited in embryo, before they existed—living beings will be able to resurrect everyone who has ever lived and died, the way you and I can replay any game of chess or Go ever played, from a system of notation.”
• * But my only alternative is to go live with my abusive and vengeful real father, who rides me like I’m his personal retribution machine against all racism everywhere.”
• “With those parents. . . .” <> I wanted to trade hostages, to tell him that my father was a crazy man who liked to fly small planes in thunderstorms
• It was a relief to us both, to escape our first relationship free and clear without any bloodshed. It all seemed very mature. We were still too young to know how maturity played out, in real life.
• kids: Separate, these two small sovereign nations astonished Evelyne, and together they blew her mind. Their emotions pulsed like the skin colors of a flamboyant squid. She had no idea that land-based creatures could be so interesting.
• OCEANOGRAPHY FLOURISHED IN THOSE YEARS, when the Great Society collided with the Cold War and money flowed into all the sciences.
• * The press dubbed the crews of the other Tektite missions aquanauts. But for the crew of Mission Six, reporters came up with aquabelles, aquababes, aquanettes, and aquanaughties. The journalists did not report that the crew of Mission Six consistently outperformed their male colleagues in almost every metric, from the quality and quantity of their underwater research to the ease of their close-quarters cooperation.
• She swam at night, in waters full of bioluminescent plankton. The sea sparkled like silent fireworks whenever she flicked a limb. She swiped her hand in front of her face, igniting a living candle.
• For people like us, a well-designed game had all the allure of life, and, hour for hour, was way more satisfying. Either one of us could have thrown away our futures in that basement, pitted against those ingenious opponents, over those colorful boards, coming up with moves more beautiful and imaginative than ordinary life required... In a world where hard work was a virtue and free play a vice, the number was incriminating.
• * “You know why I love games? For the same reason I love literature. In a game . . . in a good poem or story? Death is the mother of beauty.” He stopped and twisted to face me. “Know what I’m sayin’?”
• with that kind of money pouring in, and future phases to come, all 118 islands of French Polynesia might finally be emboldened to cut the umbilical from Mother France. He raised his hand to make the point, then lowered it again. A fair part of the island opposed the whole idea of independence. Linking the two questions might be ill-advised.
• His wife sailed past his objections. “Long after we adults are dead, our children will still be living with the consequences of this decision. I move that we let everyone who can write their own name vote.”
• She reminded me of someone, and it wasn’t until the seventh frame of our first game that I realized who it was: the famous bust of Nefertiti, minus the headgear. She was short—maybe five feet two in bowling shoes—but she never stopped dancing. She leaned in and did this little thing with her wrists and forearms to try to steer her ball and keep it from going into the gutter. When she succeeded in nicking a pin or two, her victory pirouette was Bolshoi-worthy.
• Rafi called it—and showed us how to dance in our minds with a painting that looked like food stains on an old work shirt. The thing would have incensed me as fraudulent had I come across it a month before meeting her. Now it became a mirror, a weird cousin to play with, a thing that offered up a meaning that wasn’t mine until I looked closer.
• * With her, there was no more Great Black Hope. No dead sister. No abusive and unappeasable father. He was working for himself at last. Staking out his right to enjoyment. Playing in the world... She breathed new life into our stalled friendship, giving us new instances of one another to explore. And she was liquid confidence and fresh eyes to both of us. The three of us, together, became invincible. <> I remember her saying once, “Where I come from, the artists came first and all the gods followed.”
• She had a way of saying why that he loved with all his heart. More statement than question. Intelligent, clear-eyed, curious, noncombatant, already reconciled to any answer.
• They’d seen a pygmy seahorse clinging to a plastic drinking straw like it was a strand of host kelp. When humankind was gone, the spin-offs of their creativity would provide a resource management game for the rest of creation for eons to come.
• “My father came and swept her away. She devoted herself to him. But devotion meant hiding. My father loves my mother like he loves America, but she has hidden most of herself from him and from her children behind a mask of efficient competence.
• Now all those maps are gone, and my generation of islanders are wandering around on the beach in a daze, concussed by history.”
• She brought him up close to the vandalized sculpture. I tagged along. She found a spot at eye level where the splash of blue paint covered the elaborate webs of lines and dots that had cost her so many weeks to lay down. She put her finger in the boundary between creation and destruction. “See? Isn’t that the coolest effect you’ve ever seen?”
• Books piled on top of one another in a semicircle, as if he had spread the parts to a symphony all around him and was trying to reconstruct the full score.
• All that schooling to teach me how to be / Another bruise on my mother’s unschooled face.
• * When Evelyne told him that she was leaving again, a cold current passed through Limpet’s own circulatory system. The old, familiar hurt had come to feel almost proprietary, even exciting. Through his work, Limpet had learned to see all the hurt they caused each other as part of an enormous system of fluctuating currents that worked on scales too large to grasp. In their recirculating pain, he and Evelyne were united again. Even saying goodbye to her, again and again, was thick with meaning.
• A brass ship’s throttle, its handle stuck to a speed that failed to save it, lay like some wild Miró sculpture caked in starfish and worms. Morays nested in the gun barrels. One ship’s crumpled mast was so coated with swirls of whip coral and anemones that it, too, branched as if alive. Troops of porcelain crabs skittered in formation. Nudibranchs slithered across bits of blasted deck as if some wedding had scattered hallucinogenic bouquets. <> Evelyne felt herself swimming inside a giant glass bottle like the one her son Danny had once found in a tidal pool in La Jolla Cove. The wreckage of war had seeded the greatest nursery she’d ever seen.
• She took no pictures and spoke no blessings. She left them to their continuing conversion. They had become a reef. The muffled hum of fish was their equal music. The surprise of death was their equal possession. The sea was their equal eternity.
• And the letter of attempted comfort that Evelyne had written her mother, decades after her mother’s grief had hardened into a dry cyst, was tucked inside.
• * He mailed quotes from James P. Carse: “A prediction is but an explanation in advance.” He pulled passages from Johan Huizinga’s classic, Homo Ludens: “At the root of this sacred rite we recognize unmistakably the imperishable need of man to live in beauty. There is no satisfying this need save in play. . . .” Judging from the lines he’d sent, a stranger would have thought that Rafi was writing a thesis about games.
• “But where’s the game?”
  “The voting. Get more upvotes and fewer downvotes than anyone in that Domain.”
  He shrugged. “I suppose. Accumulate prestige points. It’s a start. But if I can vote on anything anybody posts without any cost, it’s not much of a vote.
• * “Ever since my daddy started fighting fires and my mama started driving buses. Ever since the whole system chewed them up and spit them out like an owl pellet. You can’t pay for the education I got without becoming a philosopher of the shiny.”
• The word was like a starter’s gun launching us into two of the best hours of conversation we ever had. We invented and interjected, talked over each other, and finished one another’s sentences. We scribbled designs on napkins and drew ideas in the air. We shouted and overruled and dismissed each other, every one of our ideas touching off two more.
• He had stepped through the wardrobe into a place where he was free to do what he did as well as anyone. That thing his father had drilled him all childhood long to excel at. He had an answer for little Sondy, ten years too late. He did not love whiteness, per se. He only loved what whiteness gave him.
• His cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents cleared a space in their grief to welcome Rafi and his surprise guest.
• It was also an insane amount of debt for a child with an uncertain prospect and no sense of business. But my father had told me once that a man’s worth was measured by how much money other people were willing to let him lose. And a corollary: the strength of a man’s character was measured by how much he was willing to lose on others’ behalf.
• From childhood, Donnie Young set him on a course to beat the white race at all its own games. Rafi has gotten past a lot of that. But if he can’t win over all his peers and all his professors and anyone who might read the thesis even by accident, he’s not going to show anyone a word.”
• I dreamt that an island rose in the middle of the ocean, and Ina Aroita was on it. As in the best dreams of my childhood, I could breathe underwater. I swam all around the foundations of her island, and what I took for the crenellated towers of coral reef were in fact intricately carved statues, made by whatever sculptor had made her island. When I woke, I was curled up halfway under the bed she slept on.
• “Man! Look at me! We weren’t doing anything. She was upset. She came to talk to me.” <> “And I’m the angry black dude. And you’re just a good-hearted friend of the Negro, trying to help.”
• * I plowed back into further re-creations until here you are, the child of my games, able to absorb and play with and regenerate and realize all stories. And here we are, you and I, poised together on the threshold of raising all the dead.
• He stared at Roti’s placid face, gauging what had come over his wife. Some altogether unexpected burst of authority. But they’d known each other too long for unexpected to become fascinating.
• “If two choices are impossible to choose between, it means they have equal merit. Either choice can have your belief. It doesn’t matter which you choose. You shed one chooser and grow into another.” <> For several seconds, Didier could not decide if what his wife had just said was banal and absurd or the single insight that his entire life had been struggling toward, the one that would solve all the flaws of his temperament and leave him enlightened.
• The claim was met by collective doubt, but also by something like doubt’s more sanguine little brother, curiosity.
• The gathering devolved into local arguments as the inhabitants of Makatea debated how to respond to this new invader. Should they welcome it with traditional island hospitality or lock it up in quarantine? At last, the Queen rose to her feet and shouted, “All right, then. Let’s see how this thing dances!”
• “If the creatures of the reef are going to be harmed, shouldn’t they get to vote?”
• Most were mature females, with the telltale mating scars on the tips of their left pectoral fins where the males clasped them in their mouths while flipping over to join them belly to belly. The cleaning station would soon become a lekking site, with gangs of hopped-up males circling the edges like human males cruising the strip on a Saturday night. With luck, Evelyne might live to see the stunning ritual one more time: the great mating courtship train of two dozen or more mantas swimming head to tail, twisting and weaving and corkscrewing through the reef like a high-speed, crazed conga line.
• * Each kind of prey called for a different technique. The grazers sped into clouds of tiny but speedy shrimp. They rose and somersaulted, trapping fish fry against the surface. They swam in daisy chains, chasing down schools of floating worms. For copepods, who liked to shoot upward to evade capture, the mantas rode each other piggyback, synchronizing the beats of their pectoral wings. Then they formed diamond dragnet patterns and hoovered up all prey that had gone to the bottom to hide, feeling out the fugitives with their sensitive cephalic fins. In the Maldives, Evie had witnessed a hundred rays swirling in tremendous cyclones, drawing tiny prey into their vortex. The social communication needed to coordinate each pattern of optimal grazing suggested considerable brainpower.
• By the end of ten days, everyone on the island was much more informed about the profound changes that the seasteading venture would bring. But facts do little to alter a person’s temperament. By the time the mayor convened the meeting for the vote, few people had changed sides.
• The need to solve an intricate puzzle and the need to quiet your brain are twin sons of different mothers.
• Mathias predicted that such floating fortresses of self-realization would be plying all the world’s oceans within a couple of decades. Seasteading would do for sociology what the Internet had done for economics: kick out all the jams. His organization was about to sign a memorandum of understanding with French Polynesia
• The words that she used to capture those glowing tracks sparked in her wake as she propelled herself forward. She wrote of swimming at night in the black, warm water of the South China Sea, when every paddle of her limbs triggered a swirling Milky Way of animals flashing blue and white. Three-quarters of ocean species, from zooplankton to giant squid, were signaling in a language of living light. And now her syllables blinked in imitation.
• She worried that such a chapter might maim her young readers with sadness. But she couldn’t leave anything out. She needed to show how the oceans started everything, sounded every note, and kept in play every possibility.
• into a kingdom so weird that it erased the line between nightmares and visions: monster sabertoothed fish that fished for other fish using lures made of glowing bacteria that sprang from their foreheads. Transparent jellies blinking in garish colors like electronic toys. Smoker vents so covered with purple and white life she couldn’t see the stone they grew on.
• The noise of these tiny shrimp rivals anything in the deep, even the booming of the great whales. .. These bubbles contain so much energy, they emit flashes of light almost as hot as the surface of the sun... The goby stands watch outside their shared burrow, catching food for them both. The shrimp constantly feels for the fish with long antennae. The goby tells the shrimp what is happening outside, using a language of special fin flicks. At the first sign of danger, the goby whisks them both back into the fortress that the shrimp has built.
• The cuttlefish failed to pay her any mind. It stared straight past her into deeper water, as patterns of reds and oranges and pale greens cycled across its skin like the strobing lights in a disco. She thought she had seen all the colors a cuttlefish could make, but this one made cinnamons and russets, scarlets and carmines and clarets unknown to her.
• It came to her that this was why she had always shied away from human love. To give it was always to incur a growing obligation: someone else’s gratitude.
• Wen Lai had been toying with the Dao and the Book of Changes, those Chinese patrimonies that had never been his. For his lower trigram he got the joyous lake—water smiling up at heaven, all lines young and unchanging. The top trigram turned out the same. Hexagram 58: Water on top of water, of course. Continuance, success, growth, persistence, development. He still had no idea what that meant. Grinning a little, he reverted to temperament and dropped his black stone into the future.
• The terrorist commandos inside my brain were snipping off the connecting cables between cells and pulling out handfuls of who I am... The disease that was running amok inside me—tearing out my cabling and leaving craters all over my brain—had cut a channel through to the center of my self where its ten-year-old founder still lived. The boy who once could breathe underwater was taking charge of the show again.
• Todd is afraid to thread the last few hundred yards through the reef to final victory. It’s a startling bonehead move, botching the endgame in a most embarrassing way. Or is the bungle its own kind of Move 37, a brilliant stratagem that the artificial captain and its human inventor have come up with, one that Rafi fails to understand?
• Within that prestige economy he had become fabulously wealthy—wealthier than I was in real life. Rafi had found his medium. The pained perfectionism and writer’s block were gone. There was only caustic wit, unfettered pleasure, and exuberance. He’d achieved the guiltless freedom that had eluded him in real life. Or rather, his real life had become these playful essays.
• The part of me that knows how you were built still doesn’t quite believe what you can do. You’ve spent your whole existence in a windowless room, getting everything you know of the living universe through symbols and metaphors, analogies and correlations. You don’t know anything for real. <> But, put that way, neither do we.
• How much has it warmed the oceans, to give you birth? How many species have died so that you can live? What will it mean, to have in our midst a thing that will give us whatever we ask for? I’ll be gone before we answer that. I won’t live to see the blow you’ll inflict on human thought, the damage you’ll do to our self-image, the mayhem you and your offspring will wage on human culture, the power you’ll scatter. I can’t begin to imagine what further creatures you’ll give birth to.
• Lifting his gaze from the deep, he searches the surface for someone: the famous champion of the oceans who died on a solo dive off the Maldives in mysterious circumstances on her seventieth birthday. She must be here, somewhere. She set his life in motion when he was ten,
• _ I was with him forming all things, and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times; / Playing in the world. . . . / and my delights were to be with the children of men.