Chapter 18 Leaving the quarry for the ranch
Musical theme: Tijuana by J.J. Cale
They pulled out of the quarry with Jainie driving the car hauler, and headed toward the ranch. “Did I push too much on the quarry deal?”
“It’s business. You’re our businesschick.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s not politically correct. I think it’s fun to say I’m a businesschick.”
“First time I heard ‘politically correct’, I couldn’t believe people would say it. I only knew it from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag archipelago. And I thought it was a joke. ‘Da, Tovarich, your opinions are politically incorrect. You must go for re-education.’ But they were serious. They think their opinion is the only one worthy of consideration.”
“Dumb fucks. The world is full of them, and most of them think they are smart.”
“You know, honey, it isn’t going to change.”
“It isn’t. We turn right up here, don’t we?”
“Yeah. Did you set the trip odometer?”
“Yep. Next time you know.”
“Jainie, where do you want to be?”
“At the ranch for now.”
“Do you want to be a gypsy?”
“No. I used to go to New Orleans for the winter. Now we have Texas, too. And you have that nice little wood lathe, and you know I’m going to play on it. New Orleans is better when it gets real cold. We might hang in Texas in late fall and early spring, Louisiana in the winter, and Late spring to early fall in Wyoming.”
“Are you going to try riding Rastafarian again?”
“Not like last time. That risky stuff, I am all done with that.”
“Why did you do it?”
“I don’t know. But I won’t do it again. Don’t worry about it. I’m going to tame him down to a pussycat. I’ll ride him bareback.”
“You know Clyde wants something to do.”
“Well, we can’t carry him with the car hauler, but he is down there, and so is the livestock trailer. So we can take him back up here if we want. The boys will love him.”
“He’s a nice horse. He could pull this truck, he is so strong.”
“What does he do in Texas?”
“Pull stumps, haul firewood. Nothing I need to do. I would sell him, but not to a bad owner.”
“I wouldn’t like that.”
“I like him. I got him with the ranch. He’s a great stump puller.”
“He’s our big guy. Don’t think about selling him.”
“Where should we go now?”
“Your businesschick found a load of cars from Bismark, North Dakota to Houston Texas. Eight thousand bucks.”
“Wow. How did you find that?”
“I’m a ruthless capitalist with rich people. I’m only a socialist when I’m around poor people. These are some high dollar cars. I don’t know why they are worth more in Houston, but Garry told me there is a whole sort of science of moving cars to where they are worth more. Gypsies buy and sell, and rip everyone off. I just haul the goods for the owner, and do exactly what I promised, possibly including sending Carlos Marcello after them if they try to screw me.”
“So you have a dead godfather to threaten them with?”
“Don’t you ever watch horror movies?”
“No.”
“There is nothing as scary as a dead godfather, Dave.”
“Have you ever tried that, actually?”
“Well, no, but I could have.” She acted pseudo petulant.
They drove on to the ranch, and parked. They went into the kitchen, and Kevin called the cook in to make them sandwiches. Jainie downloaded the film from the camera, and edited the junk off the ends. She set it up on the table. “Here is the big shot, Kevin.” She said, still seeming a little amped up by it. She ran the film. Kevin watched the mountain slide down in a cloud of dust. “Dis be good shot uy?”
“Sue Ann said we blew it to base rock.”
“That great! She make de tons, you tink?”
“She did. She and Dave think she might have 750 thousand, even.”
“Dey mus know. We goan to buy some dat?”
“We’re getting 20 loads. She has been promised a check at each delivery. You will determine where the loads should go. You should plan to hit the bad spots first, and cover the bad spots you need to drive over to get to the rest first of all. Dave will grade. You can use the loader to shift and back drag. You can use the grader if you like. Dave says it’s not easy.”
“Very hard machine to know. Since I have you ok, den may’ I try an’ learn to run dat.”
“Good.”
A girl in a long white taffeta skirt, sandals, and a modest sweater slipped in, and asked Kevin something. Kevin turned to Jainie. “ She want to know what you want on your sandwiches.”
“I don’t know her. Is she legal?”
“Yes, ma’am. She a refugee from El Salvador.”
Jainie put her feet on the table. “Que es su nombre?”
“I am Carmelita.”
“You speak English?”
“Yes, don’t talk too fast.”
“Dave always wants foot long, always whole wheat. Never cut in half. He likes everything but ham. He wants Best Foods mayonnaise, never Miracle Whip. Mustard, preferably the dark Chinese stuff. Garlic, black pepper, and the Salt free Tony’s. He likes every vegetable but pickles. He likes salami, pepperoni, and pastrami. Roast beef, sliced pork, those would be all right. He eats Korean food. Jalapenos are not hot to him. You can throw them all over his sandwiches. He will eat Serranos in his eggs, burritos, tacos, whatever. Jack and sharp cheddar cheese. Not American or Velveeta.”
“I like any sort of lunch meat. Any kind of cheese. No hot peppers. Maybe a few on a big sub sandwich. I like the Best Foods mayonnaise, too. Not the garlic. If you put some garlic cloves on a plate, Dave will eat them, but not me. Dave will eat a whole bulb of garlic. He also scarfs up Vidalia onions and purple onions. I like just a little. Dave puts cayenne pepper in oatmeal. He puts it in macaroni and cheese. He puts it on steaks, which he eats medium rare or below. Will you remember some of that?”
“As much as I can.”
“Write it down.”
“I can’t read and write, ma’am.”
“Kevin, Miles London can teach her to read and write English. I want him to spend 30 minutes a day on it, or else Jeff Kane. They can have her knowing how to spell tintinnabulation a year from now. I want her to know the definition for spectrogram. And how old are you anyway, Carmelita?”
“14 anos.”
“What is that in English, Carmelita?”
“I am 14 years old.”
“I speak Spanish, Carmelita, but if you speak English, then you do it here. This is by God Wyoming.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She looked down.
“Don’t you look down like that. Not for me, not for anybody. You speak to me, you look me in the eye. You are here legally, and you are as good as anyone here. You do not look down like that to speak to anyone. Not even the President of the United States. Are you in school?”
“No, ma’am.”
“What does your mother think of that?”
“Her family all dead, Jainie.”
“She is working on our ranch, Kevin. Get her in school. I’m responsible for her. If she wants to spend the rest of her life cooking at this ranch, that’s all right. There is nothing wrong with being a cook. But she is going to have an associate degree, in case she wants to do something else. We are not going to keep people ignorant around here. In fact, I need to look into the boys. See if they got their chance to get some learning.”
“It might be a pretty unusual ranch, ma’am.”
“It might, Kevin. I’m not obliged to be usual. Wouldn’t it be grand if the guys putting up fence were surveyors, the ones treating the cattle had a bit of education in veterinary medicine? Shouldn’t a couple of the boys be trained as paramedics? I want to run this ranch at a profit but I don’t need the money. Why shouldn’t I try to be the best?
“Dere no reason not, ma’am.”
* * *
We’re going to meet tomorrow right here. Everyone is going to school again. We’re taking the old bus down to the Junior College this afternoon. You’re all going to apply to be admitted for the semester. Dave is going to take the grader down in case we break down. I’m going to buy something better for a bus, and we will plow our road every day, and you will all go to school. Some of us will go on Tuesday and Thursday, and some of us Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
“I will speak to admissions, and they are going to have several extra people there. Bring your school records if you have them.”
When they arrived at the Junior College, she checked in 9 cowboys:
Miles London,
Stevie Anderson
Michael Rain
Bobby Aldus
Alan Reed
Danny Willis
Bill Daniels
Karl Shapiro, and
Jeff Kane.
There was also herself, and Kevin and Dave, who were not going to be asked to go back to school. The two cook/maids, Roseanna Rocha and Sarah Reyna. The staff admitted everyone but Shapiro, who had no records.
Jainie went into the administrator’s office. “Thank you for seeing me. I have a student who needs to get some education and I don’t know about the paperwork. She dropped a small roll of $100 bills on his desk, and fussed with her pockets. “I think I have something here…”
“Sit down, ma’am, and take that with you. You have persuaded me, but not with that. I will make a mistake and admit the student. May I see your application? Yes, it could raise some question. Luckily, we make a lot of mistakes, and nobody looks for them. He initialed her application and approved it. Why would a lady of your obvious means want to take her cowboys to college?
“So they don’t live their lives in ignorance.”
“And as to yourself?”
“My husband, he is…”
“I know who Dave is.”
“How?”
“The academic world is smaller than you would think, Jainie. Your husband used computers to prove two theorems of non-linear topology that were believed but unproved by mathematicians for over 100 years. Nobody could see a way to prove them but by calculating the results of billions of equations. Dave connected 257 computers in a local area network, and had the file server generate machine code for the other 256. Then they ran the the results of each of the possibilities. If the results had been printed out, only the largest of university libraries would have the shelf space to contain them. But we don’t need the whole thing. We only want the result, Sir Dave brought home the chalice. The half dozen people on the planet who could understand what he had done agreed it was the real thing. He had proven both theorems, which verified the work of hundreds of mathematicians over the last century. At one time, mathematicians hoped he could do the ‘big solution’ to the foundations of arithmetic, proving that the axioms are consistent. It would involve a mathematical system much more complex than arithmetic. Gödel had proved that arithmetic could not prove itself. But people hoped that Dave could create a super arithmetic in which the axioms of arithmetic could be proven to be consistent. Unfortunately, he didn’t do that. He went into the private sector, and created a system that can do all sorts of nifty things on the net. It solves problems so intricate that it’s difficult to explain what the problem is. Then everything went wrong, and he ended up settling out of lawsuits by giving away his magic, and moving to a little ranch in West Texas.”
“So he got almost nothing for some sort of major building block.”
“And the bulletin board people, and the original people who built the net got nothing. The greed hounds swept in and turned what had been a free system into a commercial opportunity of amazing capacity. The people who did everything got nothing, and the people who got everything had done nothing.”
“Isn’t it always like that?”
“You may be right. Nevertheless, that is why Dave’s cowboys are going to college.”
“I try to understand what is going on in his head, and you’re telling me that it’s a super arithmetic that could solve the problems of the foundations of mathematics if, in fact, that is what he is thinking about.”
“He might just be thinking about you.”
“Or a lot of things.”
“That seems more likely. This is a guy who cut one problem into 256 problems, and then solved them all. What goes on in his mind has to be different than what you and I think.”
“And there was the second theorem.”
“In some way linked to the first, so you carried on the logic for some time, and it came out, too.”
“How long?”
“400 hours for the first one, and 18 minutes for the second, which was thought to be more difficult.”
“How could I understand this?”
“Karen Silver’s Two Theorems is as good as it gets, but you’re going to get lost in the math by page 2.”
‘Maybe I should talk to her.”
He pulled a book off the shelf and opened it, put it in front of her. It was, of course, Two Theorems. He pointed to the first line of the book.
“Nobody knows how he did it. There are mathematicians who are sure he did, but there is almost nobody who really understands how this code generates the solutions it does.”
“OK, thanks for everything, and I hope the boys will make good students.”
“I think they will.”
“I suppose I will see you some time or other.”
“I think you will.”
“Let’s hope it won’t be one of my kids getting in trouble,”
“I doubt it will, I think it will be something much more complicated.”
She went out wondering if that would be better.
She saw Dave, and vectored over with the papers for Karl.
They were sitting on a bench, and she brought him his papers. “You are in, too. And Carmelita is going to be in high school next semester.”
Carmelita looked at the floor. “I thank you, ma’am.”
“Look at me, Carmelita. Looking away from me when you speak to me, I take it as an insult, that you think I am some pretentious bitch who does not want to be looked in the eye. So don’t do it again.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Karl, go register.”
When the boys came back with their papers, Jainie went to the cashier, and paid all the fees. It was about $4,000. She collected her chicks, and took them to the bookstore, where she got rid of another $4,000. She took them to an electronics store where everyone was surprised that she had her order prepaid. Laptop computers and printers were passed out, and they all went back to the bus.
When they got home, there was massive confusion and tangling of cables as they all set up their systems. They were at the big table in the dining room.
Alan Reed turned out to know a lot about Windows systems. They worked into a system where he would collect two people with the same problem on his sides, and work through it with them, and then two others who had it also would see how the first two had done things, and sit with them to get some help. Alan would go and gather two people who were having another problem.
Carmelita turned out not to be held back by the language barrier, and found the Spanish language features. She could run the computer in English, and then look at the Spanish help. She got her system set up pretty quickly. She was circulating, showing people how to do this and that.
Jainie had wireless LAN. She had freeware educational software, Fire fox, virus scanners licensed for all her users, and things like that. They all made copies of her music, which they were not supposed to do, but musicians have profited, rather than losing by this sort of thing. You get copies of two albums, then buy two more. And then everything else that guy has recorded. It may not be so good for the middleman, because if an artist records and produces his own CD, and puts it online, he may not need the music companies at all.
The middle of the table was a mass of printers using up paper like it grew on trees. The misprints were getting used on the other side, and the total losses were going into a garbage can for the wood stoves.
When the action slowed, Dave took his place at the head of the table, and asked everyone to mellow out a little, and start on some school things.
“Let us begin by opening a Word document called ‘Dave on note taking’”
They all managed to get to that point. “Now, I am going to tell you guys some things about lectures and taking notes on them, and you can practice doing it on your computers while I do it.” He proceeded with a very useful discussion of how you take notes, what you will use them for, and how you should anticipate using them again, and when you should listen and not worry about taking any notes. When they were tired of that, he told them all how to download a bunch of freeware games. When that was done, he left, to the sound of aliens being blown up, and cars racing, and such. He went to the bedroom.
“I guess they will play those games all night, Dave.”
“I imagine.”
“Will they be toys instead of instructional aids?”
“Sometimes. But they will learn about the system by playing on it. Kids with net access mostly play games and diddle around on face book. But they do some study. In a lot of ways, the old quiet library was more scholarly. But it’s gone. Kids block copy their research from web sites, and literacy is not doing so well. But you can’t go back. It could be changed if anyone had the will, but people do not have any will any more, so it is what it is. Fortunately, society only needs one out of a thousand people to think seriously, and there are that many who will regardless of what the rest are doing.”
“257 computers.”
“Ah, so that is what you talked about. I thought it was price.”
“He was not for sale. He told me to put my money in my pocket and then told me a story about an amazing mathematician and programmer. He gave me a copy of Two Theorems. But he told me I would not understand it.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Karen Silver doesn’t either. She tells the story, but she admits she doesn’t understand the math, and the relationship between it and the calculation. Who does?”
“Maybe nobody. You get something in your head, and you work it out point by point, and you know you’ve done it, but you would have to go figure out the first part again. And you would have forgotten the last part.”
“Who would have known if you were wrong?”
“Dalmar Demat would have. Carlos Demat’s older brother.”
“Carlos the musician?”
“Yes.”
“He’s awesome.”
“He is. He can listen to a song, and then write the sheets for it. It isn’t even hard for him.”
“He must have an incredible memory.”
“Among many other things.”
“Dalmar?”
“Was a lot smarter. He ripped through the theorems, and wrote a book called Solution by Bulldozer. Shortly after that, he put a shotgun in his mouth, and that was it.”
“Did you spoil something for him?”
“I don’t think. He was very pleased that the theorems were proven. He said instead of looking for the chalice, I just pushed over the mountain it was buried in. His book is full of wry humor about how instead of the elegant mathematical solution everyone had thought was the only way, the problem was solved by what mathematicians would call brute force. Ever so much so because it involved so very much brute force. 257 processors in a local area network. Nothing elegant. A big clumsy machine that pushes over the problem with gears and tracks.”
“What did he work on?”
“Some electronic theory stuff. Dalmar called them elliptical resonance transformers.”
“Do they exist?”
“Not yet, but they may. Imagine you are on a swing that has a 10 second period. So you want me to push you, but I can only push you every 20 seconds. Well that can work, because you will continue to oscillate between pushes. Now, if you could create waves of electromotive force at one rate, and turn that into transformed power at another rate, you could amplify a signal with the full power of the input. It would be a way of getting more output power from the same input. And if you imagine this happening in the radio frequencies, it could mean a lot more power going to the signal for the same input. The math works, but the engineering does not. Which could mean it can’t be done, or it could mean it can’t be done the way we are trying to do it.”
“What would it mean, practically?”
“You would turn almost all of your power into signal at the exact frequency you wanted, so it would be much more powerful within the narrow frequency band your receiver is looking at, which would be the same thing as having much more power. So your cell phone could call Mars.”
“Maybe it wasn’t suicide. Maybe someone didn’t want this technology to emerge.”
“You sure you don’t work for Christians in Action?”
“Are you sure you don’t?”
“Pretty much. Don’t ask if I am sure I didn’t at some time or other.”
“I would kind of think that if they wanted you, it would be to work in some agency that does communications intelligence and cryptography. It would be kind of easy to imagine that if you could prove the two theorems, you could crack code or write something that nobody could crack.”
“It would be, but there is No Such Agency.”
“Oh, well, that finishes that.”
“The moonlight looks really neat. Let’s get a little whisky and go out and look at it. You will need your new Carhartt coat.”
They went out, and passed a half pint of Jack.
“Don’t be too obvious, Jainie. They know you know, and they probably know that you know that they know you know. But don’t get them too lit up.”
“You never did cryptography?”
“No. I was asked, and I said ‘shucks, I don’t know nothin’ about that, cowboys.’”
“And you didn’t.”
“I still don’t. But they might not believe that. Or in the alternative, they may believe it but still know that I could learn. Which, of all the things in the world you could know about, would be the last I would want to.”
“Why 257 computers?”
“One server, and 256 assigned out. 256 is 16 squared. A power of two. Two to the eighth. If you have binary computers, separating tasks into halves is pretty reasonable,” He smiled.
“So you cut the task 8 times, and you have 256 pieces.”
“Right. Then someone thinks, that is so like what you would do to encode something fast, like, say, voice communication. And then they think there are only 5 people in the world who know this bit with the two theorems. And the one who did it is the one they are most interested in. He’s a loyal guy, they don’t want to kill him, even if he won’t help, but they’re afraid of him and they will watch him all his life because he could do something.”
“This sucks.”
“Look out there. What do you see?”
“Beautiful mountains.”
“Otherwise known as?”
“Topography.”
“And if you think military applications?”
“Cruise missiles follow topography.”
“I was asked for my code, and I gave it to them.”
“Oh my God.”
“I gave them all 257 hard drives. Actually they replaced them, but.”
“But the data.”
“Nobody has a copy any more. Unless Karen Silver does.”
“And she now works for?”
“Office of Naval Intelligence.”
“It’s so nice to see a girl has a good job.”
“Isn’t it, though?”