On Broken Wings (8 page)

"What has the typical response to indoctrination been, Father? What percentage of the children that have passed through parochial schools remain communicants as adults? Do we really need any other explanation for why the schools are closing down at such a rate?"

The priest grinned without humor. "Don't you think the property tax situation might have had something to do with it, Louis? To say nothing of the problems the Church has had with zoning boards all over the country?"

Louis shook his head. "That's nothing new. The American Church has faced those forces for three centuries. It's only in the last fifty years that our numbers have diminished this way. And we're mostly to blame for it."

He scowled. "It was always a mistake, you know. Religion isn't for children, and to impose it on them by force has never been to anyone's greater good. As society has secularized, the resentments over that practice have been free to come out into the open. Is the Church better off for all these claims of the physical and emotional abuse of children by priests and nuns, even if every last one of them were eventually disproved? Are Catholics better off?"

Schliemann kept his composure with an effort. One such accusation had even been leveled at him, a decade ago. It had been his great good fortune that no one had believed it.

"Why did you baptize her, Louis?"

The younger man sat up ramrod straight at that. "Because I was supposed to. Because you would have done the same. It's the first duty of a member of the faith toward a newborn, especially if that newborn's life is in danger."

Schliemann nodded. "A duty of a member of the faith, yes. But what about you?"

Louis's face went slack. "What?"

"It's not a week ago that you sat in that very chair and told me that you thought your faith had deserted you, that you could no longer feel it in your bones the way you always had. You pleaded with me to do whatever I could for you, remember? What validity did that baptism have, coming from you?"

The younger man's words rang like the strokes of a cathedral bell, harsh and regular. "Exactly the same as if you had done it. Non-Catholics have baptized children many times. The point is to declare the child's name to God and ask God to free her from the burden of original sin. It's done, and God knows her now. And I'll thank you not to suggest a second time that I've left the faith, Father."

The priest lowered his head, abashed. "Forgive me, Louis, it was uncalled for."

"She'll get her instruction from me as she's ready for it and when she asks for it. That's as it should be. I don't doubt that you'll be involved, but I won't have you rushing her, or me."

Louis had been immovable, and Schliemann had acquiesced, but he could not dispel his unease. If Louis were correct, then two millennia of Catholic practice -- nay, the practices of religious communities of all kinds, places, and times -- stood indicted as self-destructive foolishness. But how could the scholars of the Christian Era, many of them hailed as among the brightest men ever to walk the earth, have been that wrong? And how could it be that the Church would learn its mistake from a dying man, little more than a boy, in the midst of his own crisis of faith in the hinterlands of central New York?

For some years, Schliemann had been the only priest in the parish. The isolation was to his taste. It had freed him of certain distractions he had always found annoying, albeit at the price of extra work for himself. But it was difficult to ponder such a subject without another priest to talk to.

The old priest's mouth quirked. It would not have mattered, anyway. On all subjects touching the newly baptized Christine Marie D'Alessandro, Louis had sworn him to silence.

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Chapter
8

The kitchen table was bare except for a large sheet of butcher paper. Christine and Louis sat before it. A spring thunderstorm rattled the windows. Against the backdrop of the storm, the kitchen seemed unnaturally bright.

Louis drew three pentacles in one corner of the sheet. "What do you see, Chris?"

She glanced at him suspiciously. "Three stars."

He nodded, and drew three rhomboids a little distance away. "And what do you see here?"

"Three diamonds. What does this have to do with computers?"

"Patience, Chris. I'm trying to lay some groundwork, here." He drew a large numeral 3 and pointed at it. "And this?"

"Come on, Louis, get serious."

He said nothing.

"It's a three."

"Three of what?"

"Huh? Three of anything."

"Is 'three' a thing, Chris?" He was grinning now.

"Well...isn't it?" She was beginning to feel confused.

He shook his head. "Go anywhere you want, in this house or anywhere else, and find me a 'three.' I'll pay big time for it. I've been looking for more than thirty years."

"All right, what is it, then?" Confusion and frustration were beginning to blend.

Louis shook his head again. "You're going to tell me. I'll ask a related question." He wrote "Christine" below the 3. "What's this?"

"It's my name...wait...it's a lot of other people's name, too. It's not me, but it's used to refer to me." She frowned. "Louis, what does this have to do with computers?"

He declined to acknowledge the question. "What do you call something that's used to refer to something else?" He waited, eyes and grin wide.

She thought furiously. "A name? A label? A...symbol?"

His grin blossomed into a brilliant smile. "A symbol. These are both symbols. Nearly pure, too, since they have no use except to refer to other things." He appended "Marie D'Alessandro" to her first name and pointed to it again. "That's a symbol, too. A more specific one, the symbol for you. Now, how does this symbol differ from that symbol there?" He pointed to the numeral again.

She thought a moment. There had to be a point. She would find it.

"That," she pointed to her name, "refers to something specific. This," she pointed to the digit, "refers to an idea."

He laid his pencil down and brought his hands together in three sharp claps. He appeared to be both surprised and pleased.

"You're on your way, Chris."

***

Twenty minutes later, he had bared the guts of his personal computer as she watched, and was pointing out its sights to her. She peered around his pointing hands, trying to memorize everything.

He pointed at a flat black square with a lot of little silver pins sprouting from it. "That's the central processor. Stupid thing, it's really only a mechanical mailman, but it remembers a lot of addresses and never loses a letter. It can execute about four hundred million instructions a second."

She nodded. "How much can you do with one instruction?"

"Not a lot. Add two numbers, put a number into an address, stuff like that. Over here's the random-access memory. It's usually called RAM. RAM is where a program and its data live while it's being executed. There's enough RAM in this box to hold about sixty-four million numbers, each one between zero and four billion."

She nodded again. "Is that a lot?"

"Depends what you have to do. For a personal computer, yes, it's a lot. Programs and data live in RAM while they're being executed, but when they're not, they live in here." He tapped a finger against the oblong case at the corner of the box. "This is called a hard disk. It will hold more than four billion numbers, but all you can do with them is read them into RAM and write them out again. No more than sixty-four million at a time, of course."

"Where's the stuff that does that video trick?"

"Well, some of it's right here." He pointed to a small plastic card covered on one side with the little black objects he had called chips. "This is the video interface card. It lets me write colored dots to the screen, if I talk to it nicely. The screen has a capacity of about a million dots, Each one has its own color and brightness, controlled by a number that lives on this card."

She bit her lip. "A number."

He straightened and turned to face her. "Yes, a number. A computer is basically a box full of numbers. The numbers are symbols for other things. Some of those symbols take their meanings from conventions. Others make specific bits of hardware do specific things, like lighting a particular dot on the screen in a particular color."

He settled the sheet-metal cover back onto the computer and fastened it down. "You're lucky. Once upon a time, programming was all done in binary, just zeroes and ones. All their meaning resided in the mind of the programmer. Today, we have artificial computer languages, symbols to help us work the symbols. Mostly, you won't have to worry about what we've been talking about for the past half hour. It'll be taken care of for you and concealed from you. I just wanted to give you a peek at the sand at the bottom of the system before we really got started."

She thought a moment. "Does understanding that stuff help you to do programming?"

"Well, yes, sometimes. But it isn't really necessary."

She nodded. "Then I want to learn it all."

He regarded her in silence for a long time. "All right, Chris, I'll try to give you the full ride. But let me be the judge, okay?"

"Judge of what?"

"Everything. I have to get you ready for the bigger world. You seem to be smart enough for this, but it's going to be a hell of an effort for both of us even so. These side subjects may be fascinating, but if we pursue any of them too much, you won't acquire the skills you'll need in time."

She cocked her head at that. "In time for what?"

He started to speak and stopped short. An unreadable wave of emotion passed over his face. She started to feel afraid.

Finally, he produced a wan smile. "Never mind."

***

Louis had assumed that, after a sufficient period of frustration, Christine would permit him to lead her along a more practical course. She needed to learn so much that the task seemed impossible. He had expected to go slowly and carefully. She confounded him.

She mastered binary arithmetic in less than half an hour. Character coding required about two sentences. Loops and conditional processing were hers an hour later. Less than two hours after they had begun, she had completed and tested a program to accept temperatures in Fahrenheit and print their equivalents in Centigrade, without assistance.

Louis suggested that they stop for awhile. Christine would have none of it, so he started to tell her about records and files. She locked on and would not let go. He spoke of record layouts, access methods, record addressing and content-dependent searches. Before two more hours had passed, she had completed and tested a program to maintain an address book and to search it by name, address, or phone number.

Louis pleaded for a respite. Christine pleaded for just one more project. Since she had been irritated that her address book program had been slower to find some records than others, he told her about sorting and its importance in shortening a search, and they were off again. He spoke of insertion sorts, bubble sorts, quicksorts and Floyd sorts. He described binary searches and how to perform them on a list of indefinite length. She devoured every word. By seven that evening, her address book program had incorporated an insertion sort and a binary search routine good to the limits of available memory.

Louis was limp from the effort. Christine didn't want to stop. A vast desire had awakened within her, a ferocious hunger for knowledge coupled to a ferocious need to achieve. Had he let her, she would have kept them both at the computer all night. With the remnants of his strength, he dragged her from the office.

***

He tossed a pair of chef's salads for them, feeling unequal to anything more challenging. She watched him in silence, her eyes fever bright. Her normally pale olive complexion was deeply flushed; her skin looked as if it would be hot to the touch. Her breathing verged on hyperventilation. He had never seen a human being in such a state of excitement.

When he set the bowls on the table and sat down, she made no move to pick up her fork. He had no doubt what she wanted to do, or when.

"Eat. You have reading to do before bed. We'll go back to the computer in the morning."

Perhaps it was the calmness of his voice. Perhaps she had finally noticed his fatigue. She sighed and sat back in her chair. Her jubilation began to subside.

"Thank you, Louis."

"You're welcome, Chris. Eat, for God's sake!" He forked up about a quarter of a head of lettuce and half a ham, stuffed it into his mouth, and began to chew.

She picked up her fork, then put it down again. "Thank you for making me somebody."

He gagged. Swallowing took a considerable effort.

"Chris, I am not 'making you somebody.' I'm teaching you something you said you wanted to learn. You were 'somebody' long before you met me."

But she shook her head, smiling.

"No. I was just a body. A bunch of wet holes for a bunch of big ugly guys to shove things into. I didn't know anything but how to be afraid. Now I'm going to know something. I'm going to be somebody. I'll be able to talk to people, maybe even do things for them, the way you do." Tears rained gently around her childlike smile. "Thank you, Louis, thank you, thank you, thank you!"