CIRCUITO EQUIVALENTE DE LA MÁQUINA

EDWARD WELLEN

“Professional communicators don’t necessarily

get it across.’’

Maybe because it was May. But Professor Rood felt carbonated blood bubble-dance through his veins. It gave such a bounce to his morning greeting of his tall leathery colleague and rival, Professor Kriss, when they met in the hallway that he drew a look of surprise.

Maybe because Zoë Albemarle—the chalk broke twice before he got hold of himself and used the proper pressure—sat in class in an even more revealing dress than usual.

Maybe it was feeling the potency of mind over matter and of energy over both.

In any case, he found himself launching into his old lecture on linguistics with new zest.

“Thanks to Noam Chomsky and Transformational Grammar, we learn that—” He chalked on the blackboard:

John loves Mary. Mary is loved by John.

“—which is one sentence, in its active and passive voices, is merely the ‘surface structure’ of the sentence.

“We may think we see it plain, as from a plane—” He waited till laughter had manifested itself, then went on.

“—the solid green of a rain forest. But below the surface are the reelings and writhings that make the floor of a Freudian jungle a lively place. Dr. Chomsky calls this underneathness, this grimmer grammar, the ‘deep structure.’

“But it is just here where things are getting interesting that Dr. Chomsky fails us. At least, in spite of his computer readouts and world view, he has not made clear to me the nature of this deep structure. He tells us that the foundations of all languages are a finite set of innate universals. But just what are these universals?

“As I hesitate to break in on Dr. Chomsky and his greater concerns to ask him for—to follow the forest metaphor—’clear-cutting,’ I’ve been trying to work it out for myself.

“I began by fantasying the deep structure. I’ve said it’s a Freudian jungle, and I won’t describe it except to say I was damn happy to hack my way out. After that bum trip I withdrew to the comparative safety and sanity of surface structure.”

Another pause for laughter to manifest itself. It manifested itself delightfully through Zoë Albemarle.

Where was he? Ah, yes.

“I might have vegetated there, forever unable to see the trees for the forest. But luckily surface structure lends itself Proteus-like to variations. Of these the most promising seemed—” He chalked:

John generates love for Mary. Mary attracts love from John.

“This at once suggested an electromagnetic infrastructure, quite in keeping with the make-up of the brain. Hardly a breakthrough, however. Then it struck me. In changing ‘love’ from verb to noun, I had stumbled across an innate universal!

“Long before the Industrial Revolution, man had the feeling things are taking over, or at least have a will of their own. Picture Neanderthal Man chipping a flint and blaming a skinned knuckle on the perversity of the material or the tool. Love, of course, is not a thing but a process. Still, this further formulation of the sentence gives a true sense of the underlying nature of this depersonalized world in which we are all strangers.” He chalked:

Love connects John to Mary. Mary is connected to John by love.

There it was, in white and black. And it had finished itself right on time. The classroom began emptying. He stood looking at the writing on the blackboard. Carve

that on a tree, Noam, he thought with a smile. The

smile was as much for Zoë Albemarle lingering in the tail of his eye. His chest swelled, sending the dribbles of chalk on his jacket flying in a cloudy cascade.

“Yes, my dear?” The voice did not sound quite like his own.

Zoë leaned plumply toward him.

“There’s this I don’t understand, Professor Rood—” She pointed to the blackboard.

He dusted his fingers and reached out to touch her. Then it happened.

He saw the writing on the blackboard shiver loose. It slid down the slate, tripped the eraser off the ledge, followed the eraser to the floor, gathered itself, then struck out for the doorway. Zoë had beat it out and vanished. It flowed over floorboards, doorsill, floorboards, slithering along the hallway toward Professor Kriss’s classroom.

Professor Rood trailed his handwriting. Stooping and straining to see, he thought it crawled along on tiny rootlike pseudopodia. In the mud at the bottom of the sea a living jelly feeds, grows, and multiplies. It takes carbonate of lime from the brine to make a skeleton for itself. The jelly dies and rots and adds its skeletal corpse’s mite to the chalk deposit that has been building since long before the coming of man. This living jelly puts forth rootlike pseudopodia.

Professor Kriss’s classroom was empty but for Professor Kriss sitting at her desk over student papers. She did not look up as the chalking climbed baseboard and wall and, an inverted waterfall, streamed up over the ledge and onto the blackboard.

She looked up as Professor Rood’s shadow fell across her desk and found him staring at the blackboard. Professor Kriss followed his gaze.

Six times the sentence had written itself: John loves Mary.

Mary Kriss got up, and up, and nearly swept John Rood off his feet in a hug.

14

Climacteric