Chapter Twenty-Eight
After breakfast, Enid and Gangakanta sat in a reading room, untroubled by other guests, all of whom were probably holed up in their suites like botfly larvae nestled in the epidermis of your scrotum.
“Could there be no motive?” Enid wondered.
“Everything has a motive,” Gangakanta answered, scribbling equations on a huge tapestry of stapled-together papers sprawled across a coffee table.
“It does?”
“Unless it’s random.”
“So could a murder be random?”
“If the perpetrator is a machine.”
“A machine?”
“Or manipulated by a machine.”
“How could that be?”
“I do not know.” After a pause, still concentrating primarily on his statistics, he added, “Perhaps we’re all machines.”
“Hm.” Sinking back into the couch, she stared at the window, which remained all white, like an unpupiled eye.
“Not necessarily in the sense of having been constructed, by a constructor,” he expanded. “But in the sense that each of us only follows the dictates of our design, with the capacity of our parts, to the potential of our role in history.”
“Hm. And what does that mean?”
“I really don’t know. Philosophy isn’t my field. I’m just blathering, if you want to know the truth.”
She thought for a moment, without saying anything, one leg over the other, rubbing the hem of her dress between her forefinger and thumb. “. . .I feel like that, sometimes. Like I’m a piston pumping up and down, built for some purpose I’m perfectly oblivious to. Do you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Do you ever feel like that?”
“I try not to feel. There!” He sat back in his armchair. “It’s done.”
“The whole thing?”
He shrugged. “Insofar as we have the data to include, and the parameters to meet.”
“So what have you concluded?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Do you have a conclusion?”
“Conclusion? No, no. This only yields probabilities.”
“As to which guest or member of staff might be a murderer?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And—that’s it. It won’t predict the weather, or parliamentary elections—”
“So what does it conclude?”
“It doesn’t—”
“I meant, who has the highest proba—”
“Oh, well, you see, that’s just it.”
“What?”
“That’s the thing.”
“What’s the thing?”
“About the probabilities of being a murderer. And all that.”
“I’m confused.”
“You needn’t be. It’s really quite simple.”
“Go on.”
“The model suggests that every guest or member of staff is equally likely to have done it.”
“Really.”
“Or to take it upon him- or her-self to do so in the future.”
“Is that so.”
“Yes. So”—he proceeded to fold up the papers—“our investigation may continue from this foundation.”
“Thanks for that, Aadi. Could you just predict one more thing?”
“It’s not a prediction—”
“Yes, I know, but could you tell me the probable likelihood of one more thing?”
“What’s that?”
“To what extent will our investigation benefit from your having spent so many hours on that analysis, compared to if you hadn’t done anything at all?”
“Well. . .” He looked at the table in front of him. “I’d have to make a new analysis. Do you wish me to?”
“No, no. I think we’ll be all right.”