Quicksilver(74)

At noon, I went not to the cafeteria but to Sister Theresa’s office. Her door stood open, and she sat at her desk. Although she didn’t look toward me, she must have seen me from the corner of her eye because she said, “Come in, Quinn.”

Her habit looked whiter than usual on this gray day when she invited me to have a seat in the visitor’s chair opposite her. “You’re just in time for lunch.”

On her desk were two plates with flatware, two napkins, and two glasses of cold milk. Lunch consisted of a large scoop of chicken salad on a bed of lettuce, sliced tomatoes, two hard-boiled eggs.

As I sat before my plate, on a pillow that lifted me to dining height, I said, “Our next lesson on fish isn’t till three o’clock. How’d you know I’d come sooner?”

“You got out of bed without being wheedled and prodded. You ate a reassuringly hearty breakfast. You didn’t shuffle to class like a zombie. I’ve got my spies, you know. And in spite of rumors to the contrary, I can put two and two together.”

We ate in silence for a few minutes, and then I said, “If I was an ant or a bird or a fish in an orphanage, I’d expect to be there forever. I wouldn’t know things could ever change.”

“If there were orphanages for ants, birds, and fish,” she said, “and if you were one of those things, what you just said would be true. You’d lack the imagination to envision new circumstances.”

“Yeah, but it’s more than that,” I said. “I couldn’t imagine a different place or life, and I couldn’t, like, do anything to change anything.”

“You are talking such good sense, Quinn, especially for someone who has put his poor teacher through ants, birds, and fish when ants should have made the case. How’s the chicken salad?”

“Very good.”

“There’s a special dessert. But I don’t mean to interrupt. I suspect that, as a repentant stubborn student, you have more to tell your patient teacher.”

“If we were like ants or any other bug or animal, we’d be kind of like machines, programmed to do what we do and nothing else.”

“And what would that be like, do you think?”

“It for sure wouldn’t be fun.”

“Why not?”

I paused to eat a hard-boiled egg. I didn’t pop it in my mouth whole and moosh it up, as I might have done if I had been alone or with other kids. And I never for a moment considered mooshing it up in my mouth and then slamming my hands against my bulging cheeks and spewing egg debris all over the desk, which in those days could be funny in the right crowd. I cut the egg in four and used a fork and swallowed discreetly. Then I said, “It might be fun if we had small brains like birds and fish do. Their routines probably are fun for them. But our brains are too big for us to do the same thing every day, the same way, all the time. We’d go freaking nuts.”

She blotted her mouth with a napkin, so I did, too, and she said, “What would be the point of making big-brain humans and then having all of them do the same thing as all the others?”

“Yeah, it wouldn’t make sense. That’s what I’m saying.”

She smiled. “We need to have the ability—the right—to make our own choices, even though we make mistakes. We learn from our mistakes, or we should. Scientists learn from their mistakes, and that’s how science advances. Trial and error. Without error, there would be no progress.” We ate in silence for a few minutes, until she said, “Now we come to the hard part, huh?”

“Totally,” I agreed.

“Tell me what you think the hard part is.”

After I finished my chicken salad, I said, “If we can make choices, we can make either good ones or really bad ones.”

“It’s called ‘free will,’” she said. “We can be kind to one another and love one another—or we can be cruel and do evil.”

I didn’t want to cry, and I didn’t think I would, but then I thought of the evil that Litton’s father committed, and tears came. They were quiet tears, but I couldn’t stop them for a while.

Then I said, “So that’s the deal, I guess, huh?”

“It’s a package deal,” she said. “Free will and freedom itself require the problem of evil. People who are truly grown up, not just in years but also in their minds and hearts, understand that freedom can’t exist without the choice between right and wrong. To be free, we accept the problem of evil—and then resist it.”

Resistance didn’t seem enough to me. “Maybe someday aliens from another planet, like thousands of years more advanced than us, will show up, and they’ll have figured out how to do everything right and how to stop people from ever making mistakes, doing the wrong thing, and then they can teach us.”

“You better hope they don’t show up, Quinn. Such a race would be a hive. A tiny ruling class, certain of its moral superiority, would have obliterated the free will of the drones, crushed those who resisted. They would have no patience to teach us. They would just destroy us.” She smiled broadly. “Dessert?”

She’d bought the Italian equivalent of chocolate éclairs from Bellini’s, the bakery and specialty store at the far end of the block from the orphanage. Anyone who had ever eaten one would know that these fantastic treats could have come from nowhere else.