“Shh,” I said.
“—the person we’ve all been waiting to hear, Dr. Ringgit Dinari.”
“What happened to Dr. Onofrio?” I asked.
“Shhh,” David said.
Dr. Dinari looked a lot like Dr. Onofrio. She was short, roundish, and mustached and was wearing a rainbow-striped caftan. “I will be your guide this evening into a strange new world,” she said, “a world where all that you thought you knew, all common sense, all accepted wisdom, must be discarded. A world where all the rules have changed and it sometimes seems there are no rules at all.”
She sounded just like Dr. Onofrio, too. He had given this same speech two years ago in Cincinnati. I wondered if he had undergone some strange transformation during his search for room 1282 and was now a woman.
“Before I go any further,” Dr. Dinari said, “how many of you have already channeled?”
Newtonian physics had as its model the machine. The metaphor of the machine, with its interrelated parts, its gears and wheels, its causes and effects, was what made it possible to think about Newtonian physics.
“You knew we were in the wrong place,” I hissed at David when we got out to the lobby.
When we stood up to leave, Dr. Dinari had extended her pudgy hand in its rainbow-striped sleeve and called out in a voice a lot like Charlton Heston’s, “O Unbelievers! Leave not, for here only is reality!”
“Actually, channeling would explain a lot,” David said, grinning.
“If the opening remarks aren’t in the ballroom, where are they?”
“Beats me,” he said. “Want to go see the Capitol Records building? It’s shaped like a stack of records.”
“I want to go to the opening remarks.”