That raised a chuckle from his fellow workers, who knew Stan was one of the brightest in the pool and had forever been turning down training chances in favour of staying with these people, the stalk jacks, his friends – friends who were increasingly his followers.
‘Oh, I was good at the numbers. Wouldn’t deny that. I could count to three before I was, well, three.’ He pulled a face. ‘Which confused me. But round about then I figured that I mostly didn’t need the numbers that go much beyond three. There was only one of me, two of my parents, together we made three.’ He looked down at his lunch. ‘I got three sandwiches here, three beers. I guess I’ll be needing the john three times during the shift.’ He looked around with a grin. ‘And I’ve been figuring, if I was to ask somebody smart, I mean really smart, what life was all about – how I was to live it – I think I’d measure that smartness, not by how many words he or she spouted, not by how many books he or she had written—’
He picked up a book now from his pile of stuff. Rocky recognized a battered old copy of Spinoza’s Ethics. Stan threw it out into the crowd, and people jumped to grab it.
‘No,’ Stan said, ‘I’d think they were smarter the more they boiled down their wisdom. The closer they got to the number three – to three simple rules of thumb, if you like. Who needs more than three? Such as.’ He held up his left thumb. ‘Rule of the First Thumb. Apprehend. Which is a nice word if you roll it around your mouth. Apprehend.
‘It doesn’t just mean “understand”, although it includes that meaning, fully. It means you should face the truth of the world – not let yourself be fooled by how you’d like it to be. You should try to be fully aware of the richness of reality, of the mixed-up complexity of all the processes going right back to the birth of the stars that have produced you and the world you live in, and this very moment …
‘And you need to apprehend other people too, as best you can.’ He gazed out at upturned faces. ‘Even those close to you. Especially those close to you. “You cannot love what you do not know.” That’s from an old religious teacher, some saint or other. That makes sense, doesn’t it?’
‘I grok you!’ somebody called, to general laughter.
Stan grinned back. ‘That’s catchier. And here’s another way of saying this. Be here now. Which is the title of an Oasis album.’
One of the senior engineers, an elderly British guy, raised a solitary whoop in response. ‘Gone but not forgotten, Stan!’
‘Be here now. If you have a god, then consider that every moment you’re alive and aware in this glorious world is a moment of awareness of that god – and to live in that moment is the only way you can be aware of your god …’
Melinda murmured, ‘Now he almost sounds like Celandine.’
Martha said fiercely, ‘But there’s also some Spinoza in there, I think. For all you brainiacs dismiss the work of mere humans. Also the rationalist atheists who said our ethics must be drawn from human experience … I’ve tried to study this stuff. So I could find ways to talk to my son. Did you see who caught the book, by the way?’
Rocky had. ‘Mo Morris.’ One of the innermost group Stan called his ‘buddies’, and some of the jealous outsiders referred to as ‘superfans’ – if not by some more pejorative term – and who Martha called the ‘misfits’. Mostly young, mostly male, they were odd, needy characters, at least in Martha’s view, for whom Stan’s sudden charisma, revealed when he got back from the Grange, filled a hole in their lives they’d barely even known existed. Now here they were, lapping up every word, recording Stan on their phones and tablets, or just slavishly writing down every word he uttered, every lame joke. Certainly none of them had hung around with Stan before his secret journey. They were a growing flock from which Rocky, his oldest friend, the only one around him now aside from his mother who’d really known him before, was increasingly excluded.
And yet Rocky couldn’t walk away, any more than Martha could. For Rocky feared for Stan’s safety.
Stan was still talking. ‘And you know what I’d expect this smart person to say to me next?’ He stuck up the thumb on his right hand now. ‘The Rule of the Second Thumb. Be humble in the face of the universe. Of course if they were that humble they wouldn’t be laying down the law in the first place. Be humble. You got to be aware of your limits, right?’ He glanced up at the space elevator. ‘We all have meaningful jobs on this thing. But you do what you can do. Unless you can solve fourth-order differential equations you ain’t going to be much help in the design office, are you?’
‘I bet you could solve them, Stan,’ called up one of the buddies.
Stan shrugged. ‘Not beyond third-order. I told you I can only count up to three.’