Chiang98

I looked at him dubiously. “You can cook?”
“Just one dish,” he admitted. “But it's a good one.”
“Sure,” I said. “I'm game.”
“Great. We just need to go shopping for the ingredients.”
“Don't go to any trouble—”
“There's a market on the way to my house. It won't take a minute.”
We took separate cars, me following him. I almost lost him when he abruptly turned in to a parking lot. It
was a gourmet market, not large, but fancy; tall glass jars stuffed with imported foods sat next to specialty
utensils on the store's stainless-steel shelves.
I accompanied Gary as he collected fresh basil, tomatoes, garlic, linguini. “There's a fish market next door;
we can get fresh clams there,” he said.
“Sounds good.” We walked past the section of kitchen utensils. My gaze wandered over the shelves—
peppermills, garlic presses, salad tongs—and stopped on a wooden salad bowl.
When you are three, you'll pull a dishtowel off the kitchen counter and bring that salad bowl down on top
of you. I'll make a grab for it, but I'll miss. The edge of the bowl will leave you with a cut, on the upper edge
of your forehead, that will require a single stitch. Your father and I will hold you, sobbing and stained with
Caesar Salad dressing, as we wait in the emergency room for hours.
I reached out and took the bowl from the shelf. The motion didn't feel like something I was forced to do.
Instead it seemed just as urgent as my rushing to catch the bowl when it falls on you: an instinct that I felt
right in following.
“I could use a salad bowl like this.”
Gary looked at the bowl and nodded approvingly. “See, wasn't it a good thing that I had to stop at the
market?”
“Yes it was.” We got in line to pay for our purchases.
Consider the sentence “The rabbit is ready to eat.” Interpret “rabbit” to be the object of “eat,” and the
sentence was an announcement that dinner would be served shortly. Interpret “rabbit” to be the subject of
“eat,” and it was a hint, such as a young girl might give her mother so she'll open a bag of Purina Bunny
Chow. Two very different utterances; in fact, they were probably mutually exclusive within a single
household. Yet either was a valid interpretation; only context could determine what the sentence meant.
Consider the phenomenon of light hitting water at one angle, and traveling through it at a different angle.
Explain it by saying that a difference in the index of refraction caused the light to change direction, and
one saw the world as humans saw it. Explain it by saying that light minimized the time needed to travel to
its destination, and one saw the world as the heptapods saw it. Two very different interpretations.
The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an
utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one casual and the other teleological, both
valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available.
When the ancestors of humans and heptapods first acquired the spark of consciousness, they both