Trust math in the locker room — "Todder, you can trust math.’ […]…"
‘Todder, you can trust math.’ […] ‘Take a breather, Keith. Todd, trust math. As in Matics, Math E. First-order predicate logic. Never fail you. Quantities and their relation. Rates of change. The vital statistics of God or equivalent. When all else fails. When the boulder’s slid all the way back to the bottom. When the headless are blaming. When you do not know your way about. You can fall back and regroup around math. Whose truth is deductive truth. Independent of sense or emotionality. The syllogism. The identity. Modus Tollens. Transitivity. Heaven’s theme song. The nightlight on life’s dark wall, late at night. Heaven’s recipe book. The hydrogen spiral. The methane, ammonia, H2O. Nucleic acids. A and G, T and C. The creeping inevibatility. Caius is mortal. Math is not mortal. What it is is: listen: it’s true.’
Context
Pemulis consoling his Big Buddy Todd Possalthwaite — nose still taped from the Eschaton debacle — who's weeping "Nothing's true" over a welching father. In scene 073 Pemulis's doctrine was that the map must never be confused with the territory; here is that doctrine's direct sequel: when the territory (fathers, deals, sense, emotionality) proves untrustworthy, the one thing left to trust is the pure map-realm itself, deductive truth with no territory under it at all. ("When you do not know your way about" is Wittgenstein's definition of a philosophical problem, smuggled into a locker room; "inevibatility" as written.)