Crosstalk

by Connie Willis

“If everybody minded their own business,” the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.” — LEWIS CARROLL, Alice in Wonderland

“You don’t want to know. Trust me. Especially what guys think. It’s like a cesspool in there. I mean, it’s even worse than the stuff they say

on the internet, and you know how bad that is.”

There’s such a thing as being too connected, you know, especially when it comes to relationships. Relationships need less communication, not more.”

Then why does every sentence beginning ‘We need to talk’ end in disaster?

Our whole evolutionary history has been about trying to stop information from getting communicated—camouflage, protective coloration, that ink that squids squirt, encrypted passwords, corporate secrets, lying. Especially lying. If people really wanted to communicate, they’d tell the truth, but they don’t.”

“And you know who people lie to the most? Themselves. They’re absolute masters of self-deception.

“Hedy Lamarr,” C.B. said, tapping the photo with his knuckle. “Big Hollywood star during World War Two. She spent her spare time between making movies trying to come up with a frequency-hopping device to hide our radio signals from the Germans so they couldn’t find our torpedoes.”

“She succeeded, too. Patented the device and everything. Unfortunately, they hadn’t invented the technology for it to work yet. She had to wait fifty years, and then they used her device to design the cellphone—unfortunately. But she had the right idea.” “Which was?” “Trying to hide messages, not transmit them.

‘DED’ is when you’re so happy it kills you.

And what the hell is ‘emotional bonding,’ anyway? It sounds like something out of Fifty Shades of Grey.

“What is it with you and Hitler?” Briddey exploded. “Sorry. Side effect of spending a lot of time online. Internet conversations always involve Hitler.

Inside their heads is the only place the bad stuff can come out, which tends to make their thoughts disproportionately unpleasant. But also, people are brutish, hateful, greedy, mean, manipulative, and cruel.”

But actually, C.B. stands for Conlan Brenagh. Conlan Brenagh Patrick Michael O’Hanlon Schwartz.” “And so because we’re both Irish, you think this haploidgroup gene is what’s causing the telepathy?” “Afraid so.”

Did you ever hear of Julian Jaynes’s theory of the bicameral mind?”

“It’s a theory that for most of human history, hearing voices was a common occurrence. People attributed the voices to the gods, but it was actually the two halves of the brain talking to each other. And when the brain evolved into a single entity, the voices stopped. Or, rather, people stopped thinking of them as voices and realized they were just hearing their own thoughts.”

Jaynes’s conclusion about why the voices went away was totally wrong, but he was right about hearing voices being a common phenomenon that then disappeared. I think back then everybody was telepathic, but over time the ability largely died out through natural selection. My guess is that some people had a gene—or genes—which inhibited the uptake receptors that made it possible to hear the voices—

Though the truth is, ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ isn’t an Irish song at all, at all. It was written in Tin Pan Alley by someone who’d never set foot

on the auld sod, and so were ‘Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ra’ and ‘Christmas in Killarney.’ And ‘Danny Boy,’ the ultimate in Irishness. It was written by a lying brute of an Englishman.”

The voices weren’t gone, but they no longer roared over her, deluging her. They were calmer, quieter, like a harmless, murmuring stream. She looked over at C.B., amazed. How did you do that? I didn’t, he said, nodding in the direction of the other people seated at the long tables. They did.

But how—? He grinned. Never underestimate the power of a good book.

Reading’s an entirely different process from ordinary thinking. It’s more rhythmic and focused, and it screens out all extraneous thoughts. And—if there are enough people reading—everybody else’s, too.

“But a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction—every kind of evidence in the logician’s list—have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation.”

That’s Hardy, he said, who works great, and so does Dickens—and Anthony Trollope and Wilkie Collins. Nothing too boring, though. If your mind starts to wander, it won’t work, so no Henry James. Or Silas Marner. What you need is Barchester Towers or Our Mutual Friend. Download them to your phone so you’ll have them with you all the time. And brush up on “The Highwayman.”

What do you use for your safe room?” “I’ve had a bunch of them over the years: a western cavalry fort, a submarine, the Tardis,” and when she looked blank: “Doctor Who’s blue police-box time-travel machine.”

“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.” —ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY, The Little Prince

Three o’clock’s when every doubt and regret and guilty thought bubbles up out of your subconscious to plague you. ‘The dark night of the soul,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald called it.”

“That’s because it’s also the time when those same insomniacs read or count sheep or watch old movies on TV to put themselves back to sleep, which turns the whole world into a library reading room. I love this time of night.”

“There’s nothing so bad that it couldn’t be worse.” —IRISH PROVERB

“To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.” —DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN