Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [51]
Another time the reverse happened, and he stepped on a hidden bump under the front of his foot. But he knew that only after he had already given up on the stride and was catching himself on the other foot, thus saving himself a sprained ankle.
Things like this happened all the time. So just how fast was the brain? It appeared to be almost inconceivably fast, and in those split seconds, extremely creative and decisive. Indeed, running steeplechase and watching what his body did, especially after unforeseen problems were solved, Frank had to conclude that he was the inadvertent jailer of a mute genius. His running foot would come down on nothing at all, he would fly forward in a tuck and roll, somersault back to his feet and run on as if he had practiced the move for years, only better—how could it be? Who did that?
Eleven million bits of data per second were taken in at the sensory endings of the nervous system, he read. In each second all incoming data were scanned, categorized, judged for danger, prioritized, and reacted to, this going on continuously, second after second; and at the same time his brain was doing all that unconsciously, in his conscious mentation he could be singing with the birds, or focusing on a throw, or thinking about what it meant to be under surveillance. Parallel processing of different activities in the parcellated mind, at different speeds, taking from microseconds to a matter of years, if not decades.
Thus the joy of running in the forest, giving him little glimpses of the great unconscious Mind.
Throwing was just as fun as running, or even more so, being more conscious and easier to notice. He looked, aimed, calculated, tried for a certain result. It had none of running’s effortless adjustment, it was much more erratic and imprecise. Still, when the disk flew through the trees to its target and crashed into the chains and fell in a basket, it shared some of the miraculous quality of his tumbles; it did not seem physically possible. And if he thought about it too much he could not do it, his throws immediately degenerated into waldo approximations. You had to “play unconscious,” letting unfelt parts of the brain do the calculating, while still consciously directing that the throws be attempted.
So he played on, in a kind of ecstatic state. There was some quality to the game that seemed to transcend sports as he had known them; not even climbing resembled it. Surely it was closely analogous to the hominid hunting and gathering experience that was central to the emergence of humanity. As Frank ran the park with the guys he sometimes thought about how it might have gone: I throw. I throw the rock. I throw the rock at the rabbit. I throw the rock at the rabbit in order to kill it. If I kill the rabbit I will eat it. I am hungry. If I throw well I will not be hungry. A rock of fist size was thrown just so (the first scientist). Rock of just this size, of just this weight, was thrown at just under the full velocity of which one was capable, at a trajectory beginning just above horizontal. It hit the rabbit in the leg but the rabbit ran away. When a rock hits a rabbit in the head it will usually stop. Hypothesis! Test it again!
The players collapsed at the end, sat around the final hole puffing and sweating.
“Forty-two minutes ten seconds,” Robert read from his watch. “Pretty good.”
“We were made to do this,” Frank said. “We evolved to do this.”
The others merely nodded.
“We don’t do it,” Robin said. “The gods do it through us.”
“Robin is pre-breakdown of the