I  AM  NOT  JUST  THIS

 

There is a life inside this life. A filling of gaps. There is something between the spaces. I am different from this. I am not just this but more. There is something else to me that I don't know how to reach. Just outside my reach there is something else that belongs to the rest of me. I don't know what to call it or how to reach it. But it's there. I am more than you know. But the space is too strange to cross. I can't get there but I know it is there to get to. On the other side is where it's free. If only I could remember what the light was like in that space before I had eyes to see it with. When I had mush for eyes. When I was dripping tissue. There is something in the space between what I know and what I am and what fills this space is what I know there are no words for.

 

I  TAKE  A  DRINK

 

"If you're busy, Rob, I'll go, although it's silly, isn't it, this artifice."

"You have something for me to read, do you?"

"I want to interview Edna," Jean said.

"I thought you might have some notes for me to go over, or even some prose, actual prose, a first draft, you know, not so finely styled but full of raw technical data or something on that order. Didn't you tell me you were devising a new system of note-taking or note-arranging or whatever? Aren't you that person? I want to read, Jean. I want something to look at. I want to be of service to you. Don't talk to me about artifice please. We're supposed to be doing a book. You write it, I read it and make helpful suggestions. This is the arrangement. This is what you're here to do."

"Fine, fine."

"Edna doesn't want to talk to you," he said. "But I'll talk to you. I'll tell you anything Edna can tell you."

"Let me go over my questions here."

"Whenever you're ready."

"What about Lester?" she said. "Will Lester want to talk to me?"

"Seriously doubt it."

"Am I allowed to enter his presence and request a few moments of his time? I've talked to everyone else at least once and after all these are the key people, more or less, aren't they? I mean this is the Logicon project and they're the mathematical logicians. I want to hear their unfiltered ideas, opinions and convictions. What kind of journalist would I be if I settled for less than a face-to-face encounter?"

"Let's have sex," he said. "Take off your clothes and never mind the people here. The people here are working, sleeping, climbing the slopes, camped under tables. To even things up, I will take off my clothes at the same time you are removing yours. This equalizes things."

Coiled room, she thought. A nervous little step into the coiled room I've seen from time to time to time. Oh, well, how could you have nearly continuous sex with a child-sized man and expect things to progress in a routine manner, as in the non-half-crazy world of people the same size. Look at him in this weak light, how eager to mock my past, how aware of my cooperation in this undertaking, the return of my body, the canceling of subscriptions to reverie, fancy and illusion. Touching me just his touch I think insane. From time to time mingled with the reflections in the broken glass I pass in the street or in the windows of trains crossing dead sections of town, bodies nodding under the glass halves of a tenement's outer doors, I see this room occupied by a female figure inside concentric rings. Oh, well, how could you be a man the size of a child and possess a touch that could be anything but insane, if only halfway so. I laugh at past loves, at the dreary predictability of the past itself, which may or may not make sense. Darker the better with him. Hate to see all that face-making and bizarre dimpling. Here we are now, set inside ourselves, let him have his say or nay, ruttish tyrant, cycloid, stunted pasha whirling in his silk pillows.

Once more the boy's head protruded from the blanket. He heard water running somewhere and after a while he crawled out from under the blanket and sat on the floor of the cubicle, listening intently. Sitting in the dirt was pleasant, although he was sure there was no calm that compared with the calm prevailing under the table. In time he crawled over to the segment of canvas that covered most of the entrance and he peered beneath this overhang into the dimness at the bottom of the antrum. He heard the running water. Not on the slopes this time. Closer to this level, swelling, looking for an outlet. Chill water moving through joints and break lines and over flowstone formations. Cavern water rich in nitric acid that dissolves limestone to widen existing holes. Cave-maker, Wu thought, hearing the same sound, thinking the stream might be traveling upward, carving out an embryonic cave, a living structure with a cycle that ends in death, wondering how much trouble it would be to order a rubber dinghy, neoprene wet suit, aqualung and waterproof spotlight, dismissing the idea on the grounds he would not be here long enough to see it through. The higher he climbed the darker it got. Along the rippling beam of the lamp, his eyes sought an opening.

Billy left his cubicle and walked quietly toward the barrier and out over it. There was water nearby. He could feel as well as hear it. Where the floor of the antrum curved severely upward he put the heel of his shoe to a large flat stone and kicked it right through the natural hatch in the earth where it had been wedged. Water roaring engaged his senses. He lowered himself into the nearly vertical crawlway, knowing from the roar that it was only several yards long, and then braced his shoulders against one surface and his feet against the other and descended with some difficulty to solid ground. He could see almost nothing but knew he was on the edge of the underground river. It was fully a river in power and sound. It came flowing past him, carrying clay, silt and organic debris, carrying limestone to redeposit, straight on past, leaving him only a hint of its animal presence, that complex and adaptive motivation that directs living things toward the strangeness, beauty and freedom of repeated sequences. Naturally he put his hands in the water. It was cold enough to make him tremble and when he cupped his hands and brought some water to his lips to drink he felt some seconds later a brief assertion of pain behind his right eye. Mildly frightening. When it subsided he simply listened to the river, feeling no special need to see it, photograph it or take samples home to study. He had tasted it, after all. Some element of river-taste would subtract itself from the recollection of that unit of pain and he would learn again that hidden inside everything he knew was half of what he was. The river carried with it a near-sweet breeze, although not really that, nor a mineral redolence, nor whatever quality of freshness might result from its continuous onward movement, but something more complex, traveling with it from its source, that clarified whatever distance intervened between the river and the mind through which it flowed.

Speaking outside herself, Softly thought. Sex inevitably enriches itself during those transmanic times in which to speak sensible phrases is to contravene the meaning of the act. Assuming there is sperm in my ejaculate, have my sperm cells successfully collected in my epididymis, storing themselves in that convoluted parlor while they approach the basking trance of their maturity? Important to contemplate the mechanics of one's spermatic duct system. In this way we distinguish ourselves from lower forms of copulating life.

The darkness he found had grades or stages. Where the water flowed it wove the dark into something whole. Beyond the river, or where he thought the other side must be, the darkness was not as absolute, stretching into distances that could be recognized as filling specific limits. He sat and listened, trying to detect some modulation in the roar.

 

SELF-BETTERMENT

 

Lester Bolin barely awake summoned the young woman by gesture into his quarters. He sat at the edge of the bed twirling an index finger through the thinning area of his hair as though trying to produce an ultimate flourish with dessert topping, Jean thought, noting to herself that particular men seem to have been born in pajamas, friendly tentative suicidal men, their bodies no more than stuffing for those loose-fitting playclothes. She sat in a chair with a note pad in her lap and watched Lester settle into a thoughtful yawn.

"Rob said it was all right to ask you if it's all right, you know, to talk to me."

"Why are you wearing a raincoat?"

"Clothes are a mess."

"I accept that," he said.

"Need to be cleaned and things."

"I'm Mr. Bolin."

"What can you tell me about the Logicon project that might be in my technical grasp?"

"I'm working on this thing, this sort of machine, and what I hope to do is I hope to get it to speak actual Logicon. It'll save us huge amounts of time and trouble if all the most time-consuming and trouble-making aspects of Logicon can be handled by this control system. I'm using the most advanced materials and a lot of old-fashioned ingenuity. Mrs. Lown doesn't think Logicon can be spoken. She says it's inherently unspeakable. But I think I can provide meaningful sounds for our notation, which means all we have to do is come up with a metalogical language."

"So far I'm with you all the way," she said. "Please keep on going."

"Would you like to see my male member?"

Drowsily he plucked something from the midmost hollows of his pajamas. It was vividly sleek, a Pop Art penis, not at all like Bolin himself, all rumple and shrug. After a while he put it back in, more or less as an afterthought, it seemed to Jean, and not until he'd resumed his comments on Logicon.

"It hasn't been easy. You'll never get me to say it's been easy. And the toughest aspects are still to come. This is important so watch my lips. Metalanguage. We spend nearly every waking moment, Mrs. Lown and I, trying to perfect an alternate system that we can use to analyze the consistency of the original system."

"That's it in theory," she said. "Now how will the control system actually function in the sense of electronically or whatever?"

"I don't think that's in your technical grasp."

"I was afraid not."

"I don't think that's in anyone's technical grasp who hasn't studied the matter from every angle over an extended period of time. I'm only being candid when I report that I myself have run into a great many problems in this area and expect to continue to run into a great many more problems. Now, I've spoken to you candidly and at length despite a certain amount of inconvenience, despite time lost that I could have used to better effect, i.e. the project itself, and despite repeated statements by Mrs. Lown and by me that contact with people outside the project would serve absolutely no purpose as far as our work is concerned. Despite all this I've granted you an interview. There's something you can do in return."

"What's that?"

"Show me your fuzzy-wuzzy," Lester said.

"Is it important to you, seeing it?"

"It's not important, no. When you say important, I'd definitely answer no. Not a matter of life and death by any means. If you don't want to show it, just ask whatever questions remain on your list and we'll go our separate ways."

"I'd rather not show it around too much."

"Fair enough," he said.

"Questions on my list," she said. "Rather than questions on my list, I'd like to ask you, if you don't object and even if you object strenuously, why you exposed what you call your male member and why you asked me to show you what you call by an even sillier name."

"Who could answer a question like that?"

"Do you do it often?"

"Of course not."

"Is there something about me that sort of drove you to do it?"

"There's something about me, I guess."

"What?"

"Who could answer?" he said.

It was at the precise second Billy lifted the canvas and stepped into his cubicle that Softly entered his own quarters, having just left the kitchen, where he'd had some timeless tea with Edna Lown, feeling suddenly glum gloomy morose dejected depressed, these states of mind unfolding in the irreversible succession of a thing singly perceived. From his briefcase he seized a packet of TriOmCon, tore it open and placed a pale tab under his tongue. He sat amid the pillows on his bed, ratchety ratchety come and catchety, eventually leaning over to untie his shoes and then removing the rest of the clothing and stretching for his robe, wondering in this interval of reaching out to finger the patterned fabric why it was that with the coupled obstacles of child size and cyclothymia he had to endure as well the thought-provoking if minor abnormality of a right testicle that hung noticeably lower than the left. What revenge was this on the left-flawed proportion that customarily prevailed? Balance of sag and nonsag in egg-shaped structures. Bilateral symmetry. He invented a zero-sum bi-level game with table of matching strategies. T's testicles, S's testicles. Left, right. Plus, minus. Never commented on (that I can recall) by a woman in a position to know, whether supine, astraddle, lotus-blossomed or otherwise, probably because they are so intent on the dynamics inevitably brought into play by the size of my body itself, a fact perhaps more important to their pleasure than my gracelessness, the violating aspects of my sexual presence. Child size. The innocent candor of their desire for something cherishable. In bed in his robe he tried to sustain a brief interval of unsullied stillness. Traveling upstream in microns per second, he thought. Rounded head, long tail. Traveling into warm weather and the medium of half masticated life. I am still "depressed." This should not be the case. I will stay in "bed" until it passes.

Billy noticed for the first time that the piece of paper left on his cot was not another display of Bolin's notation but another piece of junk mail, evidently delivered to Lester by mistake and then deposited here. It was a promotional item that included a small plastic key in an acetate seal. He sat on the cot and began reading.

Addressee:

Lacking in poise, self-confidence, the ability to gesture convincingly? Millions everywhere are discovering the dynamics of elocution. Our simple techniques will enable you to speak and gesture in public as never before. These self-training methods are revealed in our-

 

SELF-BETTERMENT CRASH PROGRAM

 

-by which you spend only minutes a day learning how to promote yourself with poise and lasting assurance, whether in business dealings, at social functions or in casual everyday conversation. Discover for yourself how our easy-to-follow rules will give you the skills you need to make a good impression every time you talk or gesture. Our booklet-

 

YOUR KEY TO ADVENTURES IN ELOCUTION

(the plastic key appeared here)

 

-can be yours free of charge when you agree to enroll in our Self-Betterment Crash Program. To receive this free booklet (and to be automatically enrolled at money-back rates if not pleased), do absolutely nothing. Those wishing neither booklet nor enrollment should write at once to: ACRONYM; c/o AAAA&A Guano Mines Ltd.; Dept. Aleph-Null; Aboard the Goo Fou Maru; c/o the Large Black Mooring; Kwang-chow Bay. Postcards cannot be accepted.

 

All three items he'd received belonged in the category of junk mail but it was clear that this particular piece differed from the computer quiz and the chain letter in a major respect. It included a key. A tiny plastic key, to be sure, but still a key. A notched and grooved implement designed to open a lock. With his thumbnails he attacked the acetate seal and finally succeeded in freeing the little key. It had the cheap weightless feel of something you'd find at the bottom of a cereal box. Designed to open a lock. But what lock? He heard someone coming along the path and immediately lifted the blanket and got under the TV table. Heavy-footed Bolin again. Logician on the hoof. Again the sound of a single sheet of paper wafted toward his cot. When Lester was gone the boy crawled out from under the table and approached the lone page that rested in the middle of his bed.

 

 

 

He crawled back under the table. He spent a long time thinking. Nameless danger. Time of inevitable terror. "Visit my room." A place in and of time. A place to sit and think. Who'd said that? "Visit my room." Endor. Endor's room. It was Endor who'd told him that. When you are faced with nameless danger, so on and so on, "visit my room." A place to sit and think. A room to comfort you. But Endor's room was padlocked. Endor's room had been padlocked since Endor left for the hole. He didn't have to think much longer. The key. The plastic key sealed into the junk mail. The tiny plastic implement designed to open locks.

 

A   LOT   HAPPENS

 

Billy changed his clothes and headed for the elevator. He turned a handle and the skeletal lift began to ascend. Eventually he crossed the catwalk, climbed the metal ladder, unlatched the exit grating and stood, slightly out of breath, in the canister he'd once occupied. Nothing seemed very different. He went out into the corridor, expecting to see some evidence of the kind of global tensions Softly had talked about both before and since their descent. He didn't know precisely what sort of evidence he'd expected. Sandbags maybe. Fire marshals. Boldly printed instructions for finding shelter. Blastproof cabinets full of canned goods and water. Large arrows painted on the walls. Morale-building slogans. First-aid hints. But nothing seemed very different. People came and went. The play maze was where it had always been. Linen carts were lined up along an extended section of the hallway. The voices of men and women he passed gave no indication that people here were under special stress. He found a "goal guidance phone" in an alcove and dialed INFO.

"This is tape sector B."

"I want to know Endor, where he's located, his room floor and number. Capital E-n-d-o-r. I want his room's location."

"Please state your medical history and then wait for a coded response detailing what medication, if any, is indicated as advisable in this instance. Remember, cold compress for swelling. Hot compress for tight muscles and that ache-all-over feeling. This message brought to you by the Wakefield Foundation, suppliers of medical products and chemical preparations to a generation of satisfied users."

"Being tape, you can't switch me to another line, right?"

"For simultaneous translations, dial SIMO. Your medication tape is pending. Dine internationally next time you're in Beirut. Abco-Panzer welcomes you to the newest showcase in its chain of fine eating establishments."

He hung up and stood there a while, looking around, a model of studied frustration. There was a phone directory in a horizontal slot precisely at eye level. Endor's name was listed an'd so was his room number. Billy took an elevator up there. The hallway lighting was harsh and it was obvious the walls and floor had not been cleaned for some time. There was no one around, a fact that intensified the tone of institutional dinginess. As he approached the door, it occurred to him that yes, of course, Endor's room would be set up to provide a perfect contrast to this sense of desolation. The padlock was still in place, an extremely large device attached to a metal fastener. He took the key out of his pocket, recalling his visits to the hobby room and the sort of emotional warmth generated by Endor's cluttered effects, imagining further what the room he was about to enter would look like, seeing it very clearly as he slipped the key into the cylinder. A drawing room with gothic hall chair and carved rosewood sofa. A fireplace with cast-iron grate and tasseled fabric overhanging the mantel. There would be a high-backed armchair with buttoned upholstery. There would be a hearth rug and a table with a chamber candlestick next to a chess set and a silver bottle stand. A drawing room with windows draped in layers of cloth, with a bookcase and bubble-back chairs and a mahogany tea caddy. On the walls would be large inspirational engravings and creamy portraits. Above would be a metal chandelier with frosted globes to spread the gaslight. A lacquered sewing table with mother-of-pearl inlay. A writing desk with a brass-stoppered inkpot and a curved tray for pens. On the mantel there'd be a clock as well as a vase with artificial flowers, both contained in bell jars. A drawing room with a large cabinet, shrouded in velvet, that held a tea service in bone china painted with assorted species of heather; that held biscuit barrels, toddy warmers, potpourri dishes with scroll feet, sporting ale jugs decorated with scenes of autumn; that held fruit dishes, gilded coffee cups and saucers, stoneware vases with waterweed motifs, ornamental plates that glowed in rose-splashed luster. A drawing room that provided to those who entered a sense of contentment, serenity, joy, well-being and comfort.

But it wasn't like that at all.

The room had hardwood floorboards that needed waxing. From the ceiling hung a single light bulb, unshaded. There was a rocking chair, plain in appearance, located in the far corner. A rectangular segment on one wall was cleaner than the rest of the wall. The imprint of whatever had been there indicated that the object extended from a line a few inches above the floor to a parallel line several feet below the ceiling and that it was about as wide as a pair of men standing abreast. The only other thing in the room was a Coca-Cola wall clock.

High on the northeast gradient Maurice Wu spotted a small opening in the hard earth and commenced inching his way in feetfirst. In minutes he was standing in a narrow passage full of dripstone formations whose intricacy made him think of the valves and piping of the body. He walked through a calcite basin into a small chamber. Here he decided to take off his pack and sit down a while, not really feeling the effects of the long climb until he was settled in a restful position, the labor of the ascent recalled in his breathing, a series of deep respirations easing off eventually into murmurs of de-accelerated fatigue. He looked around him now. The light from his headlamp caught a rimstone pool in the middle of the chamber. Not much else of immediate interest in sight.

The sound of rushing water he'd heard on his way up the slope was so faint now as to be part of the texture of the silence in the cave. As always in caves he felt he was here to remake himself. It was as though his senses had automatically emptied out just as he'd slipped into the opening. He was entering with a sense apparatus featureless and unformed. Caves were a test mechanism for the redevelopment of his animal faculties. Because the environmental demands were few, he was able to record the smallest irregularities in the silence and semidarkness with brilliant quickness and clarity. This enabled him to build within himself a separate presence, something unremembered, a receptive mentality that seemed to make him part of something more than the living cave around him at the same time as it set him adrift from what he could only regard as his distinctness, his Wu-experienced causal reality. At any rate he was less fearful here (although stimulated by such pure awareness that it amounted to something very much like fear, if fear could be called restlessness in expectation of danger) than nearly anywhere else. What we need, he believed, is a way to reinvent the human brain. As now constituted it can be viewed in cross-section as a model for examining the relative depths of protohistoric and modern terror. Cycles and swamp terrains of fear and periodically recurring depressions and earliest wetland secretions of dread (brain stem and midbrain), not to mention Mr. Mammal as paranoid grandee of the grassy plains, that (limbic) region of emotional disorganization, falling sickness, psychosomatic choking, another way of saying terror of the veldt, he thought, which is fear not really of lurkers in long grass but of the veldt itself, its terrifying endlessness, its obliteration of both singularity and pluralism, its lack of soul-cozying nooks, its tendency to disappear into itself, leaving us, he thought, with the geometry, music and poetry of our evolved, cross-referencing and highly specialized outer layer of gray tissue (cerebral cortex), not to mention celestial mechanics, medicine, the research and development of wars, not to mention voiceless cries in the night, utterly neomammalian this last activity, a cortical subclass of fear itself itself itself, thought Jean at her typewriter, staring at page twenty, numbered but otherwise blank, and wondering what it would take to "remember through" one's individual being on out into phylogenic space, that part of us not subject to conscious observation, out through breast-seeking mother-clinging babyhood into that segment of our ancestral mentality possessed in abundance by nonpri-mate forms of animal life, not to mention the age of the human brain, Wu thought, its unique status a matter of millions of years of neural variation from the brains of our taxonomic relatives. Oldness was becoming an obsession of his. Everything and everybody were turning out to be a lot older than anyone suspected. It began for Wu when he first learned about the charcoal-burning hearths and human skulls found half a century earlier in the caves at Chou-Kou-Tien. Everybody everywhere was being re-evaluated. In the Transvaal, Mexico, Europe, Indochina, the East African rift valley. Flint tools, jawbones, bark paper, shell necklaces, ivory weapons. One way or another the findings were pushing everything back, with ramifications broad enough to include the possibility that truly upright "men" coexisted with relatively erect "hominids."

"Hee hee," Softly remarked to Lester Bolin.

A nullifying plunge through history's other end to all those ancient and naïve astronomies of bone and stone.

He smelled it then. Having crossed the rimstone pool to wander at the other end of the chamber, he stood absolutely still, noting the acidic moldy odor of bat shit. He saw a crawlway leading to another chamber. As he emerged from the crawlway the carbide flame opened up into an immense petalous moon-vase of light, revealing the chamber to be much larger than the one he'd just vacated. He stood at the edge of the guano deposit. They were everywhere, roosting, probably by the hundreds of thousands, bats upside down, apparently blinking in response to the intruding light, their eyes becoming constituent glint-points of a vast flash effect that surged across the broad ceiling. Packed together as tightly as the colony was, it resembled some slowly gathering cave disease, a tissue anomaly that carried its own alien pale pigmentation. He stepped into the guano, careful of his footing, relieved to see it was only knee-deep. He checked the heights of the cave for cannibal bats, megaderma, never failing to find it incongruous that someone of his sensitivity would look forward (however buried the urge) to seeing these spike-nosed marauders attacking, killing and eating smaller bats. He didn't think they even belonged this far north but here they were, one gliding past him right now, impressive wingspread, nose-leaf, outsized ears, long pointed teeth, a bat fond of dismemberment, quick enough to kill in flight, capable of plucking the odd gecko from a temple wall. Of course, it was those aspects of the event considered apart from the actual killing and eating that appealed to him, considered apart from the seizure behind the smaller bat's ear, considered apart from the fact that megaderma eats everything but wings and head, considered apart from the blood and body fragments. It was the abstract phase of things for which he reserved his virtuous appreciation. The bat's flight path. The bat's sound-beaming apparatus. The mathematics of a moving target. The evolutionary logic that provides cannibalistic bats with fangs that enable them to grasp and slash.

 

m. Speech therapists regard certain words as "cues to anxiety."

n. Since words are attempts to relay impressions about the world, we must ask what shattered aspect of the world causes people to experience a conflict between the need to speak and the anxiety that weaves through a particular word.

o. Are there as many shattered aspects as there are people who experience conflict?

p. I'm tempted to say: together we blurt out the components of world consciousness.

q. This leaves unexamined what has remained unsaid.

 

In Endor's room the boy rocked in the wooden chair. It was strange how a nearly bare room could seem so dense with exhausted thought. The bulb hung at the other side of the room. The clock was on the wall to his right. On the wall facing the clock was the imprint that extended from a line a few inches above the floor to a parallel line several feet below the ceiling. It was not unpleasant to sit here rocking. The fact that the chair was a rocking chair made a difference, he felt. In a conventional chair he would have been more bored than he was. The rocker definitely belonged. It was just right for this kind of room. When Endor had mentioned the "psychological security" of his padlocked room, he must have had the rocker at least partly in mind.

There were no windows. Across the clock's face was the word "Coca-Cola" in upper and lower case letters. The clock was not the digital type, which definitely would have been out of place here. It was an old clock with pointed hands. Digital clocks, he felt, told time too bluntly. He had to concentrate for a second or so before he was able to place the digits in a meaningful context related to morning, afternoon, evening, an appointment here, a train to catch there. It may have been that most arrays of numbers had deep associations for him-mental connections that tended to develop freely when he looked at a clock that, had no dial, no moving hands, no slashes to mark the minutes. But it was more than that. Digital clocks took the "space" out of time.

It didn't take him long to realize that the hands on the clock in the room hadn't moved since he'd entered. This was in no way surprising. In a room with scuffed floors and an old rocker and a single dim bulb hanging down, it appeared to him that a stopped clock was more or less appropriate. He took it to be an element of the restfulness that Endor had claimed for the room. Although disappointed at first, Billy was beginning to think that Endor knew what he was talking about. A place to think. A room to comfort one. A measure of security. There was something about the near bareness and the relative placement of the objects violating this bareness that made him feel the "inexpres-siveness" of the room had been designed in highly precise terms. No lacquered sewing table or creamy portraits or mahogany tea caddy. Something else, however. Maybe just the rocking. The fluid viewpoint produced by this rhythmic motion. Maybe the light. The degree of grim scrutiny suggested by a naked bulb. Maybe the lines in the floor or the sound of the rocker or the tone of exhausted thought. The more bare an area, it would appear, the deeper we see. It was beginning to occur to him that something about the Coca-Cola wall clock was a lot more interesting than the fact that it was stopped.

What the clock said, the time it told, was twenty-eight minutes and fifty-seven seconds after two. It was there to see, clear as could be. The second hand had stopped precisely on the mark denoting fifty-seven. The minute hand was exactly two marks shy of half past the hour. The hour hand was between two and three, shading toward two.

Two (p.m.) was the fourteenth hour after midnight. Fourteen hours, twenty-eight minutes, fifty-seven seconds. This of course was the pulse array transmitted by the ARS extants. Fourteen, twenty-eight, fifty-seven.

At first something had been missing. The twenty-eight was there. The fifty-seven was there. It had taken him the length of several breaths to realize that two o'clock, if viewed as postmeridian time, corresponded to fourteen hours.

He had been right in believing the ARS extants used a positional notation system based on sixty. As he'd already determined, their number 14,28,57 corresponded to our number 52,137. It wasn't until now that he realized the significance of the latter number. Seconds after midnight. Time. They were giving us the time. It happened to be the case that the sixty-based system coincided with our current method of keeping time. What he envisioned briefly was a paired set of figures appearing in a drizzle not dissimilar to his own brand of handwriting:

 

The code then was just barely mathematical. There had been little to solve really. The simplest arithmetic did the trick. What was required was merely to see that the numbers in question referred to a time of day. The ARS extants were intent on alerting us to a particular hour, minute and second. No more than that. Apparently they wanted us to know that something might happen at twenty-eight minutes and fifty-seven seconds after two p.m. on a day yet to be determined.

That was it then. He'd deciphered the message, found the answer, cracked the star code. Not through mathematics as much as through junk mail-a plastic key that fit a particular lock.

He thought of the people who'd preceded him and failed. Those before Endor. Then Endor himself. He wondered now about Endor's motive in mentioning this room in the first place. Was it just security and comfort he cared about? Or did he know the answer was written on the face of that clock?

It was possible that Endor was living in a hole and feeding on larvae not because he'd failed to figure out the message but because he'd succeeded. In other words he'd interpreted the answer in a negative sense. A very negative sense. A sense so negative he'd gone looking for a hole in which to live.

In the lunar urn of the bat cave Maurice Wu excavated an area littered with broken pottery. Together the shards began to suggest certain characteristics he'd spotted in other pieces and it wasn't too long before he was ready to guess that these were fragments of a lead-glazed pottery bowl (early Han), the thickness of the glaze at the rim indicating that the piece had been fired upside down. The bowl, if assembled and properly restored, would most likely turn out to be simple in appearance. This he found disappointing. Wu liked to be daz-zled. He'd several times been a member of elaborately equipped prospecting teams that had discovered previously unknown sites and eventually found, investigated and identified such items as T'ang amphoras with handles designed to resemble dragons' heads; miniature jade vases with spiral ornamentation; a Ming figure identified as a Taoist divinity whose clothing, whose posture, whose facial expression, whose accompaniment of symbolic animals had associations that branched back hundreds and thousands of years, every such conjunction sub-scattering then into increasingly cryptic motifs involving taboos, legends, reincarnations, composite gods. How enriching he found this sort of thing, never one to overlook the fact that religion and art probably began in caves and having always viewed religion as nothing more or less than an integrated system of art in which a superhuman element is variously invoked, beseeched, prattled at and adored. A religion's success or failure, for him, was based solely on the conscious efforts of its practitioners to express their veneration in ways that reflected, expanded and altered the mind's conception and the senses' external arrest of what is beautiful. In Wu's scheme of things, Hinduism, for example, was an overflowing success, a plague-chronicle of diversities, cycles, soul wanderings and richly depressing cultural practices; while, for instance, the eerie Protestant disciplines that stressed hymn-singing and Bible-reading struck him as being deficient in those contemplative delights that color the oriflamme of art. Guano dropped nearby. He troweled and sorted in the dimness, wondering why it was that systems of religion were so often used as frames of reference for the clarification of ideas that were in no way related to spiritual attitudes. Self-contradiction. The flailing brilliance of initiates in those unspecifiable realms deemed so central to being. Newton resorting to the idea of God as an absolute encompassing structure in his theory of mechanics. Leibnitz in the heyday of his mysticism using binary arithmetic to try to convert the Emperor of China to Christianity.

Wu mused on latent history. Not the negative chronology of years B.C. but a class of intelligible events too fine to be collected in the sifting mechanism that determines which sets of occurrences are to be recorded and analyzed as elements in a definite pattern and which examined merely for their visibility as the coarser of the particles in the mesh. Latent in any period's estimation of itself as an age of reason is the specific history of the insane. Diametrically opposed entities, Rob had said, partaking of each other's flesh. Does syncretism really permeate all my thinking? Lost historic categories. Appearing neither in patterns nor as radioactive flashes. One might extend this search for lost categories to a subject as choicely off-putting as guano. The history of guano mining. Worldwide guano markets. Effects of guano on agriculture, trade, society. Bird matter vs. bat matter. Soil renewal and patterns of economic decline. Techniques of vacuum-pumping bat guano by the ton into enormous cylinders which are hauled out of the caves by an aerial conveyor system, and the profits thereof.

Not far from the fragments of pottery he found a circular bronze mirror, its reflecting surface shattered, the rest of it in remarkably good condition. This was by far the most interesting thing he'd come upon since he'd started exploring these caves. He estimated its period as late Warring States, which coincided well enough with the lead-glazed bowl.

He used his pocket magnifier to examine the back of the mirror, its concave rim, the concave band encircling the small fluted knob at the very center. Between rim and band was the ornamental field. He was both surprised and undazzled by the mirror's design element. Abstract geometric patterns executed in thread relief. A ring of figures that made him think of the ambiguous markings on the stone at Sangkan Ho. What was surprising was the fact that the design was so purely non-representational, apparently empty of any attempt on the craftsman's part to stylize animal or other figures or in any way to sacrifice reality to principles of design; most likely there'd been no thought at all of an antecedent reality. What was undazzling about the mirror was the fact that it was so completely free of the swarming ornamentation, the animal motifs, the dragon scrolls, the cosmological diagrams, the visual puns, the syncretistic juxtapositions and the b'ai kiu or play-verse as well as other types of inscriptions that characterized centuries of Chinese mirrormaking. He spotted several corroded areas that would have to be swabbed with a chemical solution to remove the offending copper chloride, an agent of what is known as bronze disease. Of course, old-ness was one thing. Europe, Mexico, the Transvaal, the East African rift valley. Oldness was one thing but reverse evolution was something else; probable mental progression in the wrong direction; advancement backward. It was one thing that the findings were pushing human origins back to a point in time much more remote than anyone had believed possible; it was quite another thing (as he was reminded in thinking of the Sangkan Ho stone) to find signs of advancing culture the deeper we probe. With his trowel he drew and marked a figure in the powdery dung.

 

 

 

So we begin to see not only that we go back much farther than previously estimated but also that there is no aspect of the natural history of the brain or femur that makes it obligatory to deduce that evidence of our extended lineage must show ever increasing primitivism-smaller and smaller cranial volume, cruder tool types, nonhuman skeletal organization. Given the questions that still existed concerning the early atmosphere of the planet and the age and nature of the first living organisms, given the factors not yet taken into account (there are always factors not yet taken into account), given the relative speed with which complicated molecular systems developed and the nonrigorous estimates of the time involved for these designs to elaborate themselves, it seemed to Maurice Wu that an element of poetic truth might be contained in the speculation that humans and their precursors filled that huge primordial blank in the fossil record (a blank just beginning to be systematically roughed-in). Not being a specialist in biochemistry he had the advantage of nearly free-reined conjecture and used it to imagine a form of accelerated evolution (a process consisting, after all, of nothing more than life plus time) taking place in some lost fold of our genetic beginnings, long before the firemakers, the cave painters, the crafters of bone daggers, the brachiating primates, the bipeds who sucked nonopposable thumbs. This expeditious, this somewhat cursory emergence would be followed, in his scheme, by a gradual decline to the point where cranial capacity measured well under a thousand cubic centimeters, which is precisely where things at the Sangkan Ho strata began to get interesting. Poetic truth usually raises more questions than the fledgling poet is inclined to answer; nevertheless, he believed, we are on to something here.

Billy kept on rocking, enjoying the illusion that the room was gradually emptying itself of exhausted thought. Dense sensations reduced themselves to points, lines and planes. The unshaded bulb. The rectangular imprint on one wall. The pattern made by the grain in the hardwood floor. The hands on the clock. The angle at which light climbed one wall. The continuous functional shift in the room's configuration (noun to verb) due to his movement in the rocker. Something may happen at fourteen hours, twenty-eight minutes and fifty-seven seconds on a day yet to be determined. The correct number of objects. The objects spaced at fitting distances. The distances defined in varying degrees of light and shade. The light and shade informed by a converse moderation. Space and periodic solids. Continuously filled transitions. Acts of the time-factoring mind.

Several ravaging bats swept past an outcropping of rock and then flashed toward the ceiling. Wu was unable to observe the subsequent kills at the precise time they took place (due to megaderma's quickness and his own delayed reaction) but did manage to "re-record" events (or fit them together) as the discarded parts of a number of roosting bats hit the floor of the cave. Deciding to inspect these particular in-edibles, presumably wings and heads, he got up and walked toward the other end of the cave, filled with a childlike mingling of aversion and thrill, the severed and no doubt bloody extremities concentrated in an area dense with limestone formations. When he got there he realized he would either have to squeeze past some jagged rocks to reach the leavings or enter the area through a small crawlway. In a prone position he began to work his way through the opening, which was of no greater length than his own body but more cramped than he'd expected. He was nearly to the other end when the flame in his headlamp went out. The darkness was total and he was frozen to the stone. He tried to think beyond the level of unchecked hysteria. The core bf his immobility was a whirl of (psychic) motion. He told himself to remain calm. He tried to fight the illusion of rush, of speed, of overwhelming events. He couldn't move his arms to reach the matches in his coveralls. With a lighted match he could easily find his way to the backpack on the other side of the cave. In the backpack were candles. In the light of one of these candles he could easily refill the carbide lamp. But he couldn't seem to move. He told himself to think into this problem calmly. After a while he was able to grasp the possibilities. Either he couldn't move because his fear had made him rigid. Or he was wedged. He realized he was not breathing properly and then felt chills in his upper body. He tried to gauge his panic, to talk to it, to determine its contents. Again he told himself to proceed with utter calm. He summarized the situation and calmly measured the depths of his terror. It was difficult to maintain a thought for more than several seconds. He attempted to concentrate on the problem of movement, on involuntary rigidity versus being wedged. This is unreal fear, he told himself. This is fear based on unreasonable foundation. This is unfounded fear. In a series of incomplete summaries he tried to tell himself what had happened, where he was, how he felt, when he would be able to move again. But being wedged. The possibility of being wedged kept occurring to him. Being wedged meant something he did not give a name to. There was still the feeling of speed to contend with, the rush of events (although obviously nothing was happening), this uncontrollable hurry in his mind, this nullifying plunge. He tried to recall precisely what had happened. Was darkness all that happened? Or did his shoulders become stuck in the crawlway as well? He wasn't sure. He couldn't remember. He was afraid to try to squirm backward. He thought this might confirm his being wedged. He thought his feet, his toes might be able to move slightly, his hands, his fingers, thus establishing that it was not fear that caused his immobility. His body itself would be stuck fast. Then he would know he was wedged. There was no dark adaptation, or adjustment of the eyes, in this total blackness. This was not just complete absence of light but a state of its own, the quality of authentic darkness, that aspect of nightlikeness which makes distinctions impossible. This dark had a special presence. It was far from empty. It was not just nonlight. It had a nature that dated back. It had intrinsic characteristics. It was animal. Be calm, he thought. Analyze the fear and you will control it. He began to wail then. It happened before he knew what was taking place and after a while it seemed that he had given himself over to this lamentation as one enters an irreversible state of being. What came out of him was a series of prolonged near-rhythmic sounds, intense and pitiful, marked by the fact that he was able to sustain each high-pitched cry far longer than might have been considered possible under the circumstances, any circumstances.

 

r. To avoid the associations commonly attached to certain words, we have renounced ordinary language in our theoretical study of patterns of reasoning.

s. In using symbols to denote logical operations, we have done much to eliminate imprecision, nuance, emotion, the variety of evocative "meanings" that cling to spoken and written words.

t. In advancing toward conclusions that are by nature unshakable, we have attempted to set aside intuition.

u. Mathematics is only as correct as logic allows it to be.

v. We have developed in fact such tightly precise levels of argument that they have led us into the midair anxiety of that engine-stalling aspect of metamathemátics in which we see only too clearly the innate limitations of formal systems, the overthrow of proof, the essential incompleteness of the axiomatic method.

w. We are left trembling with success.

x. Can we theorize on the existence of a link between the rigor of this logical undecidability and the strict limits that language has set around itself?

y. Language is the mirror of the world.

z. What we have yet to learn how to say awaits our impossible attempt to free reality from the restrictions it must possess as long as there are humans to breed it.

 

Wu was engaged in a lifelong effort to become Chinese. His crossing between the spheres was becoming burdensome in many ways, with the result that what had been a tendency to examine and strengthen the Oriental aspects of his identity was now a demanding need and more. The cultural parts could not be equated; the languages were noninter-locking; the souls did not shine in each other's light. These, it seemed, were the obstacles he faced. His own life then was a bitter contradiction of that dyadic principle of thought in which an element complements its opposite. State of being one. Singleness of purpose. Constancy and accord. Ironic that these intuitive Chinese objectives were precisely what he saw no hope of attaining in the years that remained to him (relative youth notwithstanding). During his stays at one or another division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences he was never able to believe that his presence was any more than an exchange of some unspecifiable sort, a form of reciprocal scientific politeness in which a rather anonymous prehistorian from the West is allowed to stride casually in and out of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, occasionally speaking the language to colleagues, who (as per terms of contract) answer him in elaborately meaningless phrases-this entire affair, down to the length of his stride, subject to duplication in a Western university (or some such) with a slightly Westernized Chinese scientist doing the striding and with English the language in question.

Vocal sounds in meaningful patterns.

The language itself, Chinese, was a deeply woven structure through which he tried to guide his intercultural assumptions. To become Chinese was to rethink oneself, to yield to alien verities. Whatever was in him of that nation and race had to be allowed to find its way to definitive expression. The vagueness of such an undertaking was precisely what made it seem impossible; the generalities that had to be exposed in layers; the set of personal characteristics that had to be restaged somehow; the primary source that had to be found; the embedded part of him that had to be read and understood:

Wu, risking the well-ordered foolishness of the man who leads an overexamined life, was determined to resist the prospect of failure. At some accessible level of his being, the prevailing theme, he continued to believe, was simple unity. The single-cell mechanism of man in nature. The rote-prayer of centuries of science. To be only part Chinese was to be an archery target for the honed ironies his own predicament had given precise dimensions to. His thinking led in nearly every direction to some outsized metaphor, this the object of his ironic perception, that the impediment to his personal search.

The cave was silent. He resolved to investigate this silence, to examine it systematically, to measure it in detail. It was true; he was sure of it now. Silence prevailed in the bat cave. This meant his wailing had stopped. He still felt moist chills in his back and chest but his breathing was fairly regular now and he was no longer wailing, not wailing, released from the need to wail. Events did not appear to be overrunning him any more; there was no illusion of speed to contend with. Everything was clear and getting clearer. Why had he been so confused before and why was he so nearly lucid now? He was not wedged. He knew this as surely as it is possible to know a thing. It was necessary only to squeeze backward out of the crawlway. He was certain of this. It was obvious. All he had to do was squirm back out, get a match from his coveralls, light the match, find his way to the backpack, remove a candle from the pack, light the candle, get the extra carbide, refill the lamp. This he did, all of it in a matter of minutes, and it was simple and done and over, all fiction, Jean thought, wondering what it would take to "remember through" the ochre and soot of cave art to the very reason why these earliest of artists descended to the most remote parts of caves and applied their pigments to nearly inaccessible walls, the intricate journey and the isolated site being representative perhaps of the secret nature of the story told in the painting itself, all fiction, she thought, all fiction takes place at the end of this process of crawl, scratch and gasp, this secret memory of death. Breathing evenly now he reached under his coveralls and sweater to touch his wu-fu, a reassuring moment, the bat pendant cool against his fingertips, cool and faintly moist from the sweating he'd done. No longer, he thought, am I running for commissioner of shit. Time to report to Rob and get on back to the field and leave these nocturnal flying mammals to excrete in peace. After relighting the lamp he put the residue formed by the old carbide in an airtight container, where it could not harm anything living. He heard the roosting bats begin to squeak and whistle. There was motion here and there. Some were airborne now, a few, the great majority still chloroformed in roosting posture, suspended in their self-enfolding fur. As he gathered his things together, the whistling became gradually louder and more bats pelted down off the ceiling, small and barely definable presences, the dim light stung by their veering taps and caroms. Wu sat next to his pack, wondering where the opening was that would let them find their night. Crazed bat consciousness, he thought. I must have sounded part bat for a while back there or a wailing male banshee assigned the death of the fairy folk themselves. Wings everywhere. The cave appeared to be a crumbling substance transformed continually into something that grew more and more desperate to be relieved of this endemic unrest. No special pattern disclosed itself, the bats clustering in generally circular subdivisions of larger masses, the blast of beating wings increasing in volume, megaderma still in evidence here and there, cruising in their homicidal flight paths, their private little eddies of disruption and blood, all the bats guided by orientation pulses of ultrasonic frequencies, the animal charms of echo-location, he thought (children more sensitive than adults to high frequency bursts), these pulses beamed through the nostrils of bats in flight but how interpreted on their return, he wondered, deciding ears alone were not enough and that the brain must be involved, some clever acoustic center that enables each aeronautic creature to classify in transit the nature of the object that intercepted and returned the original beamed sound. The cave was like a living madness now. Bats perhaps in the millions. It was becoming easier to detect the spaces between bats than individual bats themselves. Then even these spaces began to vanish. Wing-thundering echoes on the level of some heart-stopping natural calamity bearing down on a town. Wu began to laugh. He didn't know what was going on. He'd been in dozens of bat caves but had never witnessed the mass exit and could not place it in some logical context. It was an incoherent event. The incredible storm roar of wings. The sense of insane life rising out of what had been only moments earlier a set of limestone surfaces. The sheer number of bats. The frenzy of their withdrawal. He watched small groups of bats separate themselves from larger clusters and fly on out past a limestone column toward what he assumed was the passage that led to open night and he imagined himself on the other side of this opening, able to watch the colony emerge, first in small sets and groups and clusters, then larger units, these advance swarms followed by the main body, all flying close to the mouth of the cave as the rest of the bats came pouring out, the withdrawal taking a very long time, circles stacking up, increasingly precise figures in a vast wavering column, the wind blast deepening, the column growing taller, the cave emptying finally, no longer the slightest wisp of individual motion, all one now, a great spiraling flight that whispered into its season beyond the trees. And because he liked to be dazzled, Wu in his corner of the cave, pondering the reflecting mechanism of this means of navigation, sat laughing into the night.

 

I   SIT   A   WHILE   LONGER

 

Billy rocked in Endor's chair as Edna slept as Softly left his bed, took the elevator, crossed the catwalk, climbed the metal ladder, emerged from the canister, walked through a series of corridors and stopped before a particular door. What was unusual about this door was the fact that it had a metal bolt on the outside. Softly slid this bolt into its socket, then headed back toward the elevator.

Jean Sweet Venable stayed awake to test her own steadfastness, the persistence of her bleak resolution to confront the pain of being self-aware. The onset of the danger of true belief. The end of one's utter presentableness. The imminence of fear itself. (She relied on the convenience of titles.) What a settlement of sheer plantation ease we might occupy if only we could choose to hide now and again from thought, perception, feeling, will, memory and morbid imagination. Sleep is no help. The period before sleep was her time of greatest mental helplessness, in fact. A sense of semiwaking awareness artificially induced. Anesthesia not quite complete. Involved mental processes of deadly repetition. Blank horror. Fear in spaceless combinations. A fixed design that included death and something else as well. Sleep itself is an improvement but not always. The period after sleep is usually not as bad as the period before sleep but there are times when it is worse, when the lack of control suggests once more a treacherous anesthetic. Why isn't it possible for us to rest from time to time in some tropical swoon of nonentity? Because no matter the drugs, the cures, the sleeps, the disciplines, the medications, there is no escaping (she was on the floor now, looking for a particular blank page) the unlikelihood of escape. Maybe she had concluded prematurely that the woman in the book wasn't like her at all, at all. The name he'd given her. Impossible to think of herself with a name like that and yet names are the animal badges we wear, given not only for practical necessity but to serve as a subscript to the inner person, a primitive index of the soul, and how could she be certain, sibylline instincts or not, that the name the novelist had given her would not in the end find its rightful soul to wear. The dialogue he'd written. Nothing at all like something she would say and yet how could she know what word or words were still to be spoken. The character had fainting spells. The character sometimes sat all night in doorways. The character's underwear stank. Successive reflections. Halfway through Eminent Stammerers, Jean had imagined herself as a Modern Library Giant. Sticking with her title even after she discovered that it was not quite as technically precise as Eminent Stutterers would have been, she filled a limited number of pages with a relaxed commentary (it wasn't the deepest of texts) on the neurosis of the speech tract; on the possibility that stuttering (interruption of word-flow) is, like glossolalia (extended word-flow), an example of learned behavior that calls for negative practice or unlearning; on the phenomenon of being alienated by one's own voice; on word-fear as a threat to sanity. She wondered, now, crawling for her blank sheet, how she'd ever expected to complete the multitude of pages necessary to qualify one's book for candidacy as a Modern Library Giant. Surely to those who suffered from it (Aristotle, Aesop, Darwin, Dodgson, Moses, Virgil, among those eminent enough to be mentioned in the text), stammering to some extent represented the "curse" of verbal communication, the anfractuous blacktop route from the pure noise of infancy. It was also a "recording" of one's mental processes, a spontaneous tape of that secret pandemonium to which childhood is often prone. Imagine, nonstammerer, the terror of this simplest question: "What is your name, little girl?"

What she'd completed thus far, since abandoning the idea of a non-fiction book on Logicon, amounted to no more than a thin scattering of pages. Some of these pages even had words on them. A few, yes, a very few had words scribbled and typed here and there, starting from the top. The others, which she considered no less a part of the thin scattering of first-draft material, were lacking in formal content, although clearly numbered and therefore distinguishable from each other. The very page she was on the floor searching for happened to be numbered but otherwise blank and yet distinguishable from the other pages not only by number but in the nature and quality of the words she had not yet set down on this page. To overcome one's tonic block; to master words; to live without the inner will to stammer. Her own speech had never been hesitant, spasmodic or in any way labored. What satisfaction was there (if any) in the foreknowledge (if any) that one was on the verge of a stammer? Is there a special kind of mind (scientist, fabulist, poet) that believes in the necessity of continual psychic testing, that needs to see confirmed its own logical picture of living hell? Her childhood had been relatively free of stress. She had walked, talked and played without serious complication. "Gigg" (it had been reported to her by those who called themselves her parents) was the first word she spoke. A giddy girl, a thing that whirls. The page she'd been looking for was under some clothes that were under the bed. She studied it, easily perceiving that the certain kind of writing that would eventually fill this page was different in look, in sound, in touch from the writing she would entrust to any of the other blank pages, as indeed these remaining blanks would differ from each other. Of course, from this clear and easy perception it was just a short step to the visionary insight that it was not necessary to fill in the blank pages, to entrust any kind of writing at all to these pages. These pages were already complete. She knew what they would look like with words on them. It was not necessary to think of these words and set them down on these pages. From her knees she studied the room itself. Everywhere she looked in the room were these pages, almost all of them numbered and blank, dispersed over the various surfaces of her strewn clothes. Immense bedraggled dishevelment. She stayed awake to prolong that state of near sleep that represented the most treacherous level of helplessness. It was like spending one's life stupefied in the worst of ways, permanent hesperian depression, the mind able to comprehend nothing but its own fear, the unlikelihood of its escape from self-awareness. So these pages then, these numbered pages would one day contain a fiction of her making. It would be complete when the pages were complete, hundreds of them, or thousands, blank nearly every one, easy to imagine with certain kinds of words on them. Jean decided she needed air, night air, she needed out of here, if only for the briefest time. She could not open the door, however. The door was apparently locked from the outside. The first Latin word she'd ever spoken (according to those who claimed to be her teachers) was pupilla, which has the roundabout charm of meaning "little orphan girl" while it refers to the pupil of the eye, a connection based on the fact that when a child looks at her own miniature reflection in another person's eye, she sees a female figure locked inside concentric rings, a lone doll in a coiled room, a little orphan girl, herself, confined in the pupil of someone else's eye. Whose eye is this, Jean thought, that I am looking at so closely? What do I expect to find mingled with my own reflection in the center of that frigid iris? She took off her clothes, reclined on the bed and waited for her child-sized lover to open the door and, as he did, to enter the room and the woman in the room in nearly simultaneous strokes of motion.

Softly feeling better about things was in his quarters in his bed in his pajamas, a dynast in the lounging bliss of a culminating vision. What did it matter that divergence from type had long been identified as the inescapable trait of those maladapted to their surroundings? Size, what was size? Pigmentation, what was that in the light of the passionate science of the mind? The antrum was a cave, in effect. In caves, remember, there is no need for special size, for skin color, even for eyesight itself. The unpigmented thrive here. Microscopic mossy life. Degenerate optical apparatus. To be unfit elsewhere is to count oneself among the naturally select in this inverse austral curve. Eek what a break-is that a nose or a hose?

"Lester."

"I come in?"

"All means."

"Rob, I've been meaning to ask."

"Find yourself a chair."

"What did Dent say?"

"Dent, Dent?"

"You went to see old Dent."

"The submarine," Softly said.

"You never told me what he said."

"What did I ask?"

"You asked about the metalogical aspects of the problem."

"He said arithmetize. I remember now. He said replace every assertion with a number-theoretic statement. He was sitting in a deck chair."

"Sure, arithmetize," Bolin said. "Obvious enough. But how does that help me with the machine? In concrete terms, what do I do? How do I wire? What goes where?"

"He said something about the relay system. It sounded vague to me. I wouldn't worry about it, Les. The important thing is the language, not the machine. I don't even know why I made that trip. There was a eunuch aboard. Dent had a stone. What's that on my desk?"

"It's a bronze something. Mirror. Encased in plaster and burlap with just enough showing. Genuine artifact, my guess."

"Maurice Wu must have left it. A gift from Maury, I'll wager. He's just come down from the slopes. Cover it up, will you? Put that robe over it."

"The glass isn't much use anyway, Rob."

"Cover it up," Softly said.

Bolin thought it might be interesting to match the logical symbolism of the characters on his typewriter with a highly distinctive metalogical notation-a sort of Nazi typeface (super-Hollywood-gothic) with broad counters and thick slurping serifs. It would set off a strict contrast, command attention, forcefully highlight the existence of logical rigor. At this stage, however, he didn't know how serious he was about the idea.

For the machine itself he planned to use logically coded values rather than numbers except in the metamathematical sphere, where the need to arithmetize required numbering of the formal expressions (if he could figure out how to do it), the natural number series in this case beginning neither with zero (Peano, Hubert) nor with one (Dedekind) but, for technical reasons involving logical constants and their negations, with minus-one (Lown, Bolin).

Logicon Project Minus-One.

The machine's metallic luster delighted Bolin. The coin slot was nearly completed. Lester loved the coin slot. He'd long considered the possibility of using lipstick or paint or crayon to make formal markings on the "head" and "torso." Abstract ritualistic figures. Proto-geometry of some kind. Imagine Rob and Edna when they saw it. Imagine them putting coins in the slot and hearing the thing speak Logicon. Old-fashioned ingenuity, Bolin thought, recalling without apparent reason the faultless professionalism the young woman had shown, the reporter, when he'd made that indelicate request in the midst of their interview; the peerless near hesitation she'd utilized between his request and her reply-in-question-form. ("Is it important to you, seeing it?") He'd revealed his sex organ to her for the most innocent of reasons. Although he couldn't identify this reason specifically, he was convinced of its innocence. He'd shown his and asked to see hers. It was what people did. Usually people did this in more socially complex ways. In his momentary innocence he had done it directly. This by most standards made him either a menace or an abject of pity. He knew he was neither. What he'd done was in its own way a case of enigmatic tenderness, performed and articulated in the sheen of recent waking, an act made defenseless by this very circumstance, the bewitchment of the intellect by sleep. Revealing his genitals was a form of dreamy speech. This was the thing he'd done, the exchange he'd attempted, but he didn't know why any of it had happened. Probably his motive could not be known. His motive most likely would have to be traced to one of those impulses so close to the electrochemical essence of things that microwires in bundles would have to be sunk into the skull and the basis for his action reduced to an investigation of neural events, or oscillating shapes on graph paper. But ritualistic markings, he thought. They were bound to be amused by that. This primitive android control system. This synthetic talking primate. His wife was in the converted barn and he was in the antrum, joined now in Softly's quarters by Walter Mainwaring with an armful of documents.

"News," he said.

Softly issued a general call and in moments Edna Lown and Maurice Wu entered the large cubicle. Everyone's attention was directed toward Mainwaring, who, as he sorted the documents on his lap, working with his customary brisk efficiency, manifesting his usual confidence, looking trim, fit, ready and fresh, was wondering exactly what the ingredients were in that synthetic intensifier Softly had convinced him to take a little while ago, claiming on its behalf (Rob's actual words) "a tendency to produce insights unattainable by other means" and there was no doubt he was feeling fine at the moment, possibly at a mental peak, although he didn't know whether this justified the anxiety of having to undergo an initial period of strangely spaced breathing and rambling speech. Softly's whitest srnile. They were eager to hear him begin.

"We have not, repeat, have not yet detected evidence of an actual mohole anywhere in the galaxy or beyond. However, we feel we are making progress. At Cosmic Techniques, my home base in Toronto, we have sylphing teams working around the clock. It's important for us to find a mohole because analysis of the sylphing compounds may help us confirm the latest findings, which you'll agree, I think, are rather startling, however tentative. Using information gathered by satellites, balloon-borne instruments and, most of all, by a device of recent concoction called an echolocation quantifier, we believe we have traced the radio signals to their source."

"Tell us," Softly said.

"The source of the message is planet Earth."

"Fascinating," Lown said, drawing out the word in tentative awe.

"The signals originated from somewhere on this planet. Were absorbed in some component of the mohole totality. Were eventually reflected back this way, where,they were picked up by the synthesis telescope at Field Experiment Number One."

"That is something," Bolin said.

"Our analysis indicates that the missing matter in the universe is probably contained in moholes, as was theorized by Mohole himself. That the radio signals were definitely artificial rather than some kind of natural emission. That these signals almost surely originated in a solarr system x number of light-years from the center of the Milky Way and located in a spiral arm on the galactic plane and furthermore on a planet relatively close to the solar hub of this system, a planet having a sidereal period of revolution about its sun of x days at a mean distance of x point x million miles and an axial rotation period of x hours and x minutes, the precise figures in this bottom folder, and an average radius of x miles and a mass of x times x to the x number of pounds."

"Marvelous," Softly said. "That is absolutely marvelous."

"Sylphing is an entirely new process. Once we penetrate the secrets of moholes, the lawlessness, if you will, of the mohole phenomenon, we think we'll really make some wonderful progress in understanding the structure and constituent dynamics of the universe."

"Walter, you're a marvel. I knew you'd come through."

"We still have to confirm, Rob."

"Just as I said back then, Walter's the last one I need to fit all the elements together. The final one-of-a-kind mind. Maury, speak to us. Your turn. Tell us what you've come up with."

Maurice Wu sat slumped forward, nodding slowly, elbows resting just above his knees, palms joined and fingers pointing down. He took off his glasses, held them up, gazed into the lenses, slipped the glasses back on. Once more he leaned forward, nodding.

"Okay, cranial capacity as well as noncranial parts. This is way down past stunted pebble-tool hominids. We get modern posture, modern brain capacity, modern locomotion. Work at the strata is proceeding very slowly. Everyone is determined to be exceedingly cautious. Analysis of whatever is found has to be painstaking almost beyond belief. Removal of encrusted debris. Reconstruction of shattered bones. Microscopic examination. Okay, so what's the next level going to yield? How far back will the strata take us? To what sort of living thinking entity? Right now all I can report, aside from whatever I've already told you, is that part of a jawbone has been found. I've just been notified. It includes a fixed replacement for several teeth. Bridgework, in other words. As yet, nobody knows quite what the material is that was used to make the bridge."

"Lovely," Bolin said.

"In my own mind I've been convinced for quite some time that what the dig seemed to indicate was in fact the case. In the very distant past on this planet, there was a species of life that resembled modern man both outwardly and otherwise. Intellectually I've managed to accept this without reservation. Now, thanks to Walter, we know precisely what these people were capable of doing, technologically. They were capable of beaming radio signals into space. In time we may learn much more about them. You know, while Walter was talking, I was prompted to recall that some time back some experts in reactor engineering were having trouble explaining the details of what they believed to be a spontaneous nuclear reaction in a uranium deposit over a billion years ago. Not everything fit in. There was a chain reaction all right. The unique composition of the uranium told them that. But the conditions that would invite such an event to take place spontaneously were not likely to have been present under the circumstances that prevailed in that time and place. So."

"There we are," Softly said.

"I don't know what it means," Wu said. "But there we are. Possibly the reaction was intense enough to cause a series of rather sizeable explosions."

"Why speculate?" Softly said. "We have what we need."

"Exactly," Bolin said. "A lovely, lovely model."

"Good to excellent," Lown said.

"I mention the uranium business," Wu said, "only to suggest the possibility that our original evolutionary thrust was followed by a period of degeneration that might have been connected to radiation diseases and such. Then, at a crude toolmaking level, things swung upward once again, taking us to the point we now occupy. The answer we've arrived at here is probably the answer we've known, at some dim level of awareness, since the beginning. We've used a prescribed form, a rite of science it could almost be called, and it's included more thrills and chills than even the strata probably contains."

Mainwaring looked up from his notes.

"To summarize," he said.

They all looked at Mainwaring.

"In the untold past on this planet a group of humans transmitted a radio message into space. We don't know whether these people were directing their signals toward a particular solar system, toward a huge cluster of nearby stars, toward the center of our galaxy, toward another galaxy; or whether they knew of the existence and nature of the mohole totality and were perfectly aware that their message would return to planet Earth at a specific time in the future-a message, moreover, that was more likely to be preserved and detected, when we consider earthquakes, erosion and continental drift, in the form of a radio transmission than in a time capsule or other kind of sealed device."

"Applause," Bolin said.

"Now all we need to finish up the exercise," Softly said, "is Logicon on a platter, served up by Edna and Les. It's important we know how to reply to the message, regardless of content either way."

"We get back only what we ourselves give," Mainwaring said. "We've reconstructed the ARS extant and it turns out to be us."

Edna felt she could have done without that last wad of self-important discourse. She and Bolin went into the latter's cubicle and set immediately to work. On the typewriter stand was the old Royal portable. A sheet of paper stuck up out of the roller. Set on the ground between the legs of the typewriter stand was the short-wave radio. Next to the stand and the radio was the small plastic desk. On the desk was the framed photograph of Lown and Bolin formally posed on a small lawn on some campus somewhere, each half turned toward the camera and half facing the other, hands behind backs, Edna's left leg extended a bit, Lester's right leg likewise set forward, a large and not very interesting jug positioned evenly between the standing figures (solely for compositional effect, it was clear), the artificial dignity of the picture enhanced by the fading gray tones and the shopworn frame. Above the radio, the stand, the typewriter, the desk, the photograph, draped across the full length of one partition, was Lester's antic banner. The narrow bed consisted of canvas stretched on a collapsible frame. The chair lacked one arm. Bedclothes were scattered over most of the desk. Everything, she thought, looking into the dirt between her feet. Everything is here.

 

AN   UNUSUAL   SOUVENIR

 

Billy dialed INFO. "Speaking," a male voice said. "Is this tape I'm talking to?"

"Far from it."

"Good, I want this person's location. She's a visitor. Her name is Venable."

"Last name first."

"Venable."

"Male or female."

"She."

"Guest sector twenty-one."

"What direction is that?"

"Depends, doesn't it?"

"Depends on where I am, I guess."

"I would think so," the voice said.

"Faggot."

It took him a while to find the area. The doors were not only closed but unmarked. There was no one around, leading him to think it must be night or very early morning. One door, however, had a bolt lock on the outside. He knocked and heard Jean's voice, far away, a dim mutter of unrest. He unlocked the door and went inside. She was in bed under several layers of clothing, blankets and sheets. The room was littered with typing paper, all of it seemingly blank. Jean looked desperately weary, her face empty of all animating force. Nothing there but features, the shape, the extent, the proportions of distinct parts in a sand of white silence. He stood nearer the door than the bed.

"Am I awake?"

"Yes," he said.

"Good, because that's necessary."

"Good."

"Because without it I wouldn't be able to feel I was definitely myself really."

"Can I ask what time it is? I don't see a clock but maybe you have a watch in your clothes."

"I know the time in my head. I've been keeping time to help me stay awake. It's past dawn, I think it's well past dawn. That's generally where we are. I've been keeping mental track."

"Good."

"Why is this good?"

"Because this way we have hours before it happens because I think this is the day it might happen, whatever might happen, if anything, and I'd hate it to be only minutes. Otherwise, if not today, why wouldn't there be a calendar or something in Endor's room showing the date too? I wanted to tell you. Then I have to get back down and let the others know."

"Did you ever not feel your body was yours?"

The overprettiness was gone, the sense as well that she'd made a space between what she thought and what she sometimes said, the girlish lilt, the winsomeness that halfway guards fitful pain, questions of fearful intelligence. Lost too was a feeling of what poured forth from her, what lights, signs of sustained engagement, that earthly luck of youth unculled, the connections, net measures of being, and her willed incompleteness, the not quite committed nature of her self-acquaintance, a mind that partly clings (till now, the agon) to some ghost of otherness. What remained could be called the experimental beginning of it all. She thought it might be what had always been there. She glimpsed it now and then, obscurely conscious of what there was in common between this and that, struggling to remain awake, to think and be, to see the incurable self. Always the buried hope of an auroral moment. That magnetic dawn of first existence. What remained was not subject to analysis. It was simply what had been won, or yielded to, depending on your view.

"Did you ever not feel the presence of one particular part of you, like when you were little and you wondered under the covers if your foot was really there and being afraid to look or feel?"

"It's probably something I'll remember better when I'm older."

"Assuming you make it."

"Descartes was buried without his right hand."

"What happened to it?" she said.

"Someone took it."

"Souvenir?"

"Exactly."

"That's a wonderful story," she said. "It'll keep me awake for hours."

Edna Lown in the one-armed chair studied the old photo on the desk nearby, failing as always to see the humor Bolin saw in that stilted pairing of figures. They worked for a long time then. Lester told her about his idea for a Nazi typeface to provide a graphic stress of the contrast between Logicon and meta-Logicon. Ideal lead-in to a rest period, she announced. Again she studied the photograph, realizing finally what it was that had troubled her about the picture all these years, what (besides its failure to reward one's comic sense or to mellow the dead ends of reminiscence) had led her to feel something was faintly irregular about the whole thing. It had nothing to do with that dumb jug or the ceremonious adherence to strict relationships or her miserably ill-fitting clothes. It was a question of left and right. When the picture had been taken, her place was to the left of the container, her right leg extended. This long it had taken her to recall it clearly, the gothic arches in the distance, the elms, the armored Buicks full of existential freshmen, her own body in relation to all of these, the tennis courts, the dousing sprinklers on the lawn. In the picture she is being "pointed at" by the jug's rightside handle and it's her left leg that is extended. Of course, the reverse was true of Lester. Fact versus picture. The photo had always had this indistinct tone of wrong-ness about it. Now she knew what caused it all. The picture was flopped. Somehow the negative had been reversed and on the resulting print she and Lester had not only changed places in relation to the container but had undergone a corresponding adjustment in individual left-rightness. There and here. Then and now. It was almost as though they'd spent the intervening years contesting each other's placement on either side of a vertical axis of symmetry.

"I understand Mainwaring's got something already."

"What's he got?"

"I understand he's got a mohole," Bolin said.

In his swivel chair Mainwaring was readying himself to report the latest findings to Softly. He didn't at this stage know quite how to fit this information into the model they were on the verge of completing, lacking only the final touches on the transgalactic language itself, the means by which they'd be able to "reply" to the ARS extants. In a sense it was odd to be replying to people who (in a sense) no longer existed. But the important thing, according to Rob, is that Wu has postulated a novel evolutionary sequence and that I have traced the radio signals back to Earth. The very uselessness of Logicon, according to Rob, is what makes the project a pure act of the intellect and therefore supremely enriching. If it had been determined that the ARS extants were not Earth-dwellers but extraterrestrials (the message originating, say, in a solar system on the other side of the galaxy), the entire project, according to Rob, would have been endangered. To transmit an actual reply to the actual message-senders (or their succeeding generations) would be to miss the point of the whole thing. Besides, spoke Rob, we are the succeeding generations. Mainwaring sighed. He headed down the path toward Softly's cubicle. He was eager to leave, to get back to Cosmic Techniques and some semblance of normality, if you could call mohole identification a normal sort of pursuit. What he'd learned from his sylphing teams came as a shock and a half. They'd done it, all right. On their color-contour map (generated by telescopic data and computer analysis), they'd found themselves staring into the colorless puddle of an absorption hole, a spot on the map indicating an area in space where every kind of emission from every type of source is being absorbed by exo-ionic sylphing compounds.

"Lock it behind you," Jean said.

Softly in bed listened as Mainwaring with that uncharacteristic dampness on his brow explained that this was the first hard evidence ever gathered of the presence of moholes in the universe.

"And you've analyzed the compounds and therefore confirmed the path of the radio signals."

"True," Mainwaring said.

"Thank you, Walter. You're a winner in every way."

"There's more to it, Rob."

"Important?"

"I don't know. I'm honestly not sure at this point."

"Because we're about ready to call it a night."

"This is something hard to evaluate right on the spot."

"So if it's not tremendously urgent, let's let it go for some other time."

"What they've apparently discovered is that we are in the mohole, if that's the way to phrase it. This solar system appears to be what we call mohole-intense. We are part of the value-dark dimension. All along we've been anxious to identify a mohole somewhere out there. We felt it would help us confirm the path of the radio message. And it has, it has. In a wider application we were sure it would shed valuable light on the mohole phenomenon itself. But we never anticipated finding a mohole so close to right here, to us right here. Evidently it's just happened, it's extremely recent, we're right in it. Everything around us on out at least to the most distant planet and right in to the sun itself, our sun, we ourselves, all of us, people, matter, energy, we're part of a mohole, we're in it, we're mohole-intense."

"I don't feel any different," Softly said.

"Rob, we don't know. That's it. We don't know what it means. This is space-time sylphed. We're dealing with Moholean relativity here. Possibly dimensions more numerous than we've ever before imagined."

"All that's boring. What the senses can perceive. What the senses can't perceive. Nimbus fizgig remora."

"We used zorgs," Mainwaring said.

"I thought you used zorgs in tracing the signal."

"We didn't need them for that. We needed them for validating the existence of the mohole."

"That was the original plan. To use zorgs in tracing the signal. That's where zorgs were supposed to fit in."

"It didn't work out that way."

"Not important," Softly said. "Nothing to worry about."

Mainwaring watched him get out of bed and dress. Then both men left for the elevator. Softly looked into the darkness as Mainwaring explained that he wanted to check incoming cables for more news from his sylphing teams. Slowly the elevator climbed, making the usual noises.

It isn't necessary to write down the words. You know what it will look like page by page and that's enough to know. That's everything really. There's a whole class of writers who don't want their books to be read. This to some extent explains their crazed prose. To express what is expressible isn't why you write if you're in this class of writers. To be understood is faintly embarrassing. What you want to express is the violence of your desire not to be read. The friction of an audience is what drives writers crazy. These people are going to read what you write. The more they understand, the crazier you get. You can't let them know what you're writing about. Once they know, you're finished. If you're in this class, what you have to do is either not publish or make absolutely sure your work leaves readers strewn along the margins. This not only causes literature to happen but is indispensable to your mental health as well. But me, see, she thought, but me now, that's another side of it. Blank pages. The prose stays with me, the characters, the story, the setting. Only I know what's on those pages. Those pages are intelligible, nonviolent and sane. This is the sane way to write if you're insanity-prone and I've found it all by myself when Softly entered her from a kneeling position, her lower back and pelvis upcurved from the surface of the bed, his hands at her hips drawing her into him, body (hers) swollen and bruised, arms (hers) extended back toward the headboard, hands pushing out from that panel to drive her more fully onto his body or to make his body unconditionally part of hers. It was the briefest of sexual episodes. She was nearly herself, she felt, a body restored to its secret petitioner, her voice as she spoke into his furry ear (a routine oozing curse) reminding her of the street croak of diggers in vacant lots along the edges of that ultrasculptural city you might have scanned from the windows of your undependable train. He backed off the bed with spit on his lips and that streamlined marine glisten at the center of his body, aquatic flopping cold-blooded organ, neon gleam of it, wet with her vulval wash. His strength did not surprise her. It is something we all superstitiously assume. One's various afflictions provide the material for secret competence. Pulled from the bed she reached back instinctively to find a grip, a hold, a firm piece of something, coming away with a sheet in her hand, warm, she thought, dragged along the floor, not the least surprised by his strength, left then, the closet door coming open, waiting politely with her warm sheet, pushed and bounced inside, homunculus, madman, my child-sized lover, all buttoned in this little dark, this orphaning eye of the night, a-choo, coats and dresses in my hair, hate to wait the fate of the turning key.

But he didn't bother locking the door this time. He closed it, left it, dressed and returned to his quarters. Lester was boiling water for tea. Edna as well was in the kitchen area. Their voices dulled by fatigue. Excessive reflex action, Softly thought. Restlessness, excitation, over-alertness. Need to supply myself with some enforced relaxation. He undressed, put on his thermal pajamas, tossed his briefcase on the bed and then crawled in under it. He undid the straps and searched inside for something to sniff, swallow or lick, anything at all as long as it contained an appropriate moderating agent. Mainwaring stood in the entrance. He was dressed in jungle fatigues. Stenciled on the flap of his breast pocket were the initials WXM.

"Rob, it's me again."

"Sure, why not?"

"I was working on a letter of resignation. I'd planned to leave it on your desk. But since you're here I think it's only right we do it face to face."

"What brought this on?"

"Man to man," Mainwaring said. "What brought this on? What brought this on was the most recent communication. It's all in my letter. Do you want to see it?"

"You decide."

"It's in my pocket."

"Neatly folded, I presume. Either that or it's the tiniest resignation in corporate history."

"Do you want to see it now?"

"Read it to me."

"Maybe that's best."

"Whatever," Softly said.

Mainwaring remained in the entranceway.

"To Robert Hopper Softly," he read. "As you may or may not know, Rob, our parent organization, OmCo Research, has just been acquired in a complicated stock deal by ACRONYM, a long-term international speculative monopoly that operates beyond maritime limits. In cases such as this, reorganization is standard procedure. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that such wholly owned OmCo subsidiaries as Cosmic Techniques Redevelopment Corporation, the Center for the Refinement of Ideational Structures, the Relativity Rethink Priorities Council, Field Experiment Number One, the Affiliated Friends of the Logicon Project, the Chinese-American Science Sodality and other model-building organizations will either become defunct or will be restructured beyond present recognition. At the very least we can be certain that the services of all current personnel involved in policy-making will no longer be needed. It is therefore with sincere regret that I submit my resignation."

"Is that it?"

"End of statement."

"Acquired by ACRONYM."

"Elux Troxl."

"None other."

"Or whatever his name is."

"Guano holdings," Softly said.

"Right."

"A nonabstract proponent of actual living shit."

"Guano stockpiling, price-fixing and eventual distribution," Main-waring said. "The whole operation computerized to an extent and level of complexity never before known."

"I like your outfit, Walt."

"Rob, since your identification with OmCo is greater than anyone's, I assume you'll also choose to resign. It's best all around. I personally urge it. This is what I honestly think and feel and believe."

 

I  MAKE  AN  ENTRANCE

 

He knows enough to know he doesn't have to lock the closet door. It happens in stages like my pages. Coats, dresses, fabrics, materials, yard goods, cloth. Plenty to do here. Many ways to keep awake. No lack of activities. Touch the cloth, smell the fabric, cover my feet with the sheet. Sleep is no help. The period before sleep is my time of greatest mental helplessness, in fact. Sleep itself is an improvement but not always. The period after sleep is usually not as bad as the period before sleep but there are times when it is worse. Death is creeping logic. It is creepingly logical. Death and something else. SYNONYMS, she thought: insanity, lunacy, madness, mania, dementia. Those nouns denote conditions of mental disability. Insanity is a pronounced and usually prolonged condition of mental disorder that legally renders a person not responsible for Ms or hûr actions. Lunacy, a romantic form of insanity, can denote derangement relieved intermittently by periods of madness. Madness, a more general term, often stresses the crazy side of mental illness. Mania refers principally to the excited phase of manic-depressive psychosis and we all know who suffers from that particular disorder, his hyperactive priapic clock ticking to its own internal time. Dementia implies irreversible mental deterioration brought on by obsessive thoughts of such organic disorders as death. I could easily easily easily open the door. Or:

They had tea in Softly's quarters for a change. After listening to Mainwaring read his letter of resignation, Softly had decided to switch from a relaxant to a stimulant. He sat among his pillows, cup in hand, and smelled the dark souchong.

"What happens now?"

"You keep working, Lester-pet. You finish the notation."

"What about Mainwaring and Wu?" Edna Lown said.

"I guess they'll be leaving soon."

"I have this urge," Bolin said.

"Tell us, Les."

"I want to call you Bobby."

Softly felt his brain racing toward some chemical event of a highly suspect nature. He sipped his tea. Pulse rate. Blink rate. Degree of nausea. Sweatiness of palms. Flushedness of face. He sipped his tea once more. Edna makes good tea if Edna made this tea. But I think it was Lester, who wants to call me Bobby.

"Forget it."

"Watch my lips," Bolin said.

"Really, Les, forget it."

"Watch my lips."

"All right, I'm watching."

"Bobby."

"An experience I wouldn't have missed," Softly said.

"Were you watching?"

"Very carefully," Softly said. "What about Edna? Was Edna watching?"

"Intently," she said.

"Bobby."

"Forget it," Softly said.

"I've always had the urge. I don't know why really. Odds are we won't be here much longer. Notation's coming along. So I thought I'd indulge myself once and for all. Indulge the urge. It's kind of fun to say."

"Bobby," Edna said.

"Exactly."

"Bobby, Bobby."

"I've really enjoyed it here," Lester said. "Never guessed I'd be able to produce steadily in this kind of isolation. I feel like Kepler in his little black tent. Kepler had this tent he used to carry around with him. Whenever he felt like making some observations, he set it up in a field or wherever. A one-man tent. Small, tight and dark. A tiny hole for his telescope to fit through. He'd sit in the dark and observe. The whole sky pouring through that little hole."

"Shut up," Softly said.

Billy nearly tripped on the generator cable. He heard the voices and headed directly for Softly's cubicle. He halted about a yard inside the entrance. The others reacted to his arrival with looks of flinching inquiry. Maybe he'd slipped their minds. (Oh, yeah, him, wonder where he's been.) He watched them, awry in this mild surprise, slowly re-compose themselves, reaching back for faces and manifestations.

"I have deciphered the message," he said.

"What a charming announcement," Softly said. "I didn't know you could even get the elevator to move. You have, I assume, been doing some wandering."

"I went to a few places up there but got lost a lot too, especially coming back."

"We're glad to see you, really and truly, but no announcements please. I think we've had enough of those."

"Something may happen at a certain time."

"Not interested."

"The pulses are meant to be seen as time on a clock. When it gets that time, I don't know but something may be meant to take place."

"Look, mister, the message is indecipherable. The only value the signals have is that they got us going on the Logicon project. The message was sent from this part of the galaxy, this solar system, this planet, and it was sent 'millions' and 'millions' and 'millions' of years ago. That's all we have to know about the message. Our remaining task is to frame a reply in a universal cosmic language. It doesn't matter what the reply is. Content is not the issue. So don't go around telling people you broke the code. There is no code worth breaking. If, by some accident, you have happened upon an interpretation that appears to make a moderate amount of sense from a mathematical viewpoint, we don't want to hear it."

"So what am I here for?"

"You're here to help Edna and Lester on Logicon," Softly said. "And if there is a category of nonaccomplishment existing beyond total and contemptible failure, I believe this is where the results of your participation belong."

"What about before we came down here?"

"That part was a preparation for this part. You needed the background, the activity, the other side of the problem. It's not possible to fulfill a concept unless you set it up properly."

"Anyway, I broke the code whether you like it or not."

"You're beginning to sound like some kind of idiot savant."

"Make remarks."

"Maybe you'd rather do absurd calculations in your head than something worthwhile, something invaluable to science and the mind."

"Go ahead, say things, I don't care."

Edna Lown got up and left, returning a moment later with a fresh cup of tea.

"If this mohole business is true," she said, "maybe we ought to hear what our young man's got to say."

She left Softly's quarters again, returning this time with Mainwaring, who could barely contain his eagerness to accept the burden that specialized knowledge entails in times like these.

"Yes," he said. "It's possible that something extraordinary is going to happen. Where we have space-time sylphed, the level of unpredictability is extremely high, we feel. The laws simply aren't the same. In a sense we're wasting time even discussing it. There's nothing to discuss."

"Don't talk like that," Softly said.

Bolin made a proposal. The short-wave radio. If something funny's taking place, somebody somewhere's probably detected it, or the first signs of it, or a partial hint at least. The short-wave radio. An announcement. A bulletin. Something. Anything. It's the quickest way we have to get information.

He jogged down the path to his cubicle. They waited, saying nothing. Lester returned with the radio, set it on a chair and raised the antenna. Then he placed himself in a facing chair. The antenna was enormous, more than twice Bolin's height. He began to turn dials, picking up atmospheric static, moans and cries, ships, taxis, fire engines, beeps from research satellites. Mainwaring edged his way to Billy's side.

"We used zorgs," he whispered.

"For what?"

"Identifying the mohole."

"Zorgs are useless."

"We used them," Mainwaring said.

"Practically nobody knows what they even are."

"Softly knows, doesn't he?"

"He's one of the few."

"Softly explained how we might use zorgs. I briefed my sylphing teams. Without zorgs we would never have found the mohole."

"Amazement."

"Except Softly wanted us to use them in tracking back the signal. But we didn't need them for that. We needed them for the mohole."

"Very amazing."

Bolin had picked up a newscast that was interrupted seconds later by a bulletin concerning a suspicious person barricaded in a commercial building somewhere.

"A hole is an unoccupied negative energy state," Mainwaring whispered. "Hole theory involves 'pair creation,' which is the simultaneous creation of a particle-antiparticle pair. Holes move, just as moholes seem to move, just as a discrete particle can separate itself from a continuously dense array, leaving behind its antiparticle or hole. What Softly pointed out was that zorgs provide a perfect working mathematical model of hole theory."

"I never thought it."

"Zorgs allowed us to attack the sylphing problem in ways that were otherwise inconceivable. We had to learn to view zorgs as events rather than numbers, just as particles are events rather than things. The discrete-continuous quality of zorgs is what really helped us work out the necessary mathematics of Moholean relativity and made mohole identification practically inevitable."

"Pretty interesting."

"Things are interesting up to a point," Mainwaring whispered. "Then they aren't interesting anymore."

"The idea of zorgs applying."

"Experience and pure thought. The mind and the world. External reality and independent abstract deduction."

"How come you're in camouflage?"

"These are jungle fatigues. I've kept them pressed and handy for a good many years. Don't know why really. But this seemed a good time to slip them on."

Softly motioned for silence.

"Our mobile units are standing by," the announcer said.

There was a pause.

"This is mobile unit twenty-two," another voice said. "The barricaded suspect has been exchanging gunfire with the police for several minutes now, every abrupt report echoing clearly in this deserted commercial district, unprofitable relief from the silence that weighs so heavily at this early hour in the wilderness of cities. From the beginning a police official has been speaking through a bullhorn, his supercharged voice adding a faintly theatrical quality to the proceedings. Mist is settling on the area now, successive webs of condensation. In this grainy weave of near light, every lull between shots is filled with a sheltered sense of bedtime lazing, the feeling we all know of idle security, of high-and-dry privacy-a deception, of course, like any airy moment of disentanglement, but at the same time not a totally false picture of the somewhat muted urgency that prevails here this morning, events unfolding in the embodying harmony of a sonnet. From atop police vehicles the familiar swivel lights range through the haze as the suspect reloads and fires, perhaps aware of the classic nature of his predicament, the energy field he momentarily inhabits, the solitary trance of power, the levels of encounter and isolation he has caused to bring about. The act of sighting down the barrel of that weapon may be the release he has always sought. An ambulance, white with dark trim, purrs sullenly nearby. A marksman in a bulletproof vest raises his weapon and takes aim. This is what it's all about, isn't it, listening audience? A brief seizing brilliance in the immediate air. A death-rendered flash of perfect equilibrium. In the fog and mist of a remote warehouse district, this is mobile control returning you to our studio."

"Hi, back with traffic, weather, recipes and reviews. This note from the science desk. An unscheduled total eclipse of the sun will probably take place later today, more or less, it says here, on the other side of the world. Some minor delays on airport access roads. Details upcoming. Another water-main break during the night but first I'm being motioned at here, so let's go right now to mobile control."

"The suspicious person has been calling down a series of unintelligible remarks. He is standing in the window, shouting, now firing, now shouting, a figure somewhat melancholy to contemplate in the tempering medium of this thick rich mist. The official with the bullhorn is shouting back at the suspect. Electric hysteria begins to spread. The police are rapid-firing now, perhaps a dozen marksmen on the street, on rooftops, in doorways and windows. It is evident that the police and the suspicious person have agreed to abandon nominal reality as we pause here for a test of our clear-signal testing apparatus, a test, a test, this is only a test."

Softly moved his index finger across his throat, leading Bolin to turn off the radio. They all sat or stood in place.

"Eclipse," Lown said.

"Just a rumor," Softly said.

"Maybe it's not unscheduled," Bolin said. "Maybe it was due all along."

Mainwaring shook his head.

"Noncognate celestial anomaly."

"Don't talk like that," Softly said.

"Is science dead?" Bolin said.

"I would dearly love to know what's going on," Lown said.

Mainwaring shrugged.

"There's nothing to say. This may be just the beginning. There's nothing any of us can say to clear things up."

"Don't talk like that," Softly said.

"When does it happen?" Bolin said.

"He said later today," Lown said.

"Whose time?" Softly said.

"Later today must mean later today his time, the radio's, wherever that was," Lown said.

Mainwaring made a face.

"Obviously it won't be long. Whoever's time and wherever the broadcast originated, the eclipse will happen. That's all that matters, I would think and feel and suspect."

Softly turned his head into the fattest of the silk pillows. The others left his quarters, filing out slowly, Terwilliger, Lown, Mainwaring, Bolin. Although his face was pressed into the pillow, Softly's eyes were open. Words in isolation or combination are meaningful; connect; reflect. Think clearly, he urged himself, turning his head and looking up into the dark vast space that composed most of the antrum. Some small rocks tumbled into the barrier. He heard his colleagues in dialogue. We must re-term, confirm, he thought. It will help us think clearly, help us prepare for the conditions that may accompany this noncognate celestial anomaly. To know for certain when, what, where and how; this is necessary, looking straight up, hearing the generator shift to a more sonorous drone, reaching for his robe. Shit, piss and corruption. This was a phrase that went back several decades (in the special context of his own life) and when it entered his mind, Softly reacted as he did to every unbidden recollection of childhood and adolescence, with a sense of abomination so pronounced it caused clear physical discomfort, caused him to sweat, to tremble, this state of aversion intensified by the fact that in putting on his robe he had uncovered the bronze mirror Wu had left on his desk. Quickly he reached for a towel.

 

A   DESPERATE   MEASURE

 

Softly walked over to Wu's cubicle now, seeing Lester leave the kitchen and head down the path to his own living unit, where he sat at the plastic desk and immediately began making simple lists of things, using paper and pencil. Bolin's customary satisfaction in crossing out each item on a given list as that particular errand or mental task was attended to did not begin to match the pleasure he now derived from listing things and crossing them out with no attempt at an intervening activity, mental or otherwise. He concentrated on the simplest of lists, writing down the days of the week and then crossing them out, one by one; the names of the objects in his immediate field of vision; the names of the probable objects behind him; the articles of clothing he wore; the months of the year; brands of cigarettes; makes of cars; his favorite flavors; world religions; state capitals; countries and their chief exports. Finally he began to list the integers. He wrote down the integers not by name but symbol, listing roughly a dozen, sometimes more, before going back to do the crossing out. The integers were immensely pleasing to list, much more so than any of the other categories, the sequences arrayed like numerical paternosters. Why hadn't he realized earlier that to list something and cross it out is far more satisfying than to list something, act upon that listing and only then to cross it out?

a. I'm tempted to say: give me a cookie.

Maurice Wu was packed and ready to leave. It seemed Maurice was always coming in or going out, always rolling up sleeping bags or latching backpacks. This time he was going out, of course, and not just to do some miscellaneous caving on the slopes. There were no chairs and so he didn't invite Softly to have a seat.

"Hear what's happening?"

"Yes," Wu said.

"We have to confirm. I want to confirm. Frankly I can't stand not knowing for sure. Will there be an 'eclipse' or not? Do we just stand around 'talking' and wait for it to happen?"

"I was leaving."

"Stay," Softly said.

"There's my fieldwork. I want to get back to the field. I'm really eager to leave."

"A while longer."

"How do we confirm something like this? Something like this isn't subject to confirmation, is it?"

"Think."

"Anyway, they said it's going to happen, didn't they?"

"Just a rumor at this point."

"It was on the radio, wasn't it?"

"They said 'probably happen,' 'will probably take place.' "

"What we need is something completely out of the ordinary."

"Think, 'Maury.' "

"Didn't I hear something recently about some woman they brought in who's supposed to be able to perceive things beyond the range of the immediate present?"

"No good," Softly said.

"She's just some woman from the slums somewhere who's supposedly got this unexplained insight into the future. Didn't I hear she's in one of the complexes? Being pored over by experts in this and that discipline. Being wired, prodded and so forth. Something completely out of left field. That's what we need."

"Nammu zendo baba."

"Granted, it's a desperate measure."

"I want to keep it scientific. No seers, diviners, soothsayers or clairvoyants. This is a scientific project."

"I'm trying to think of her name. I've been hearing about this woman. An interesting case apparently. She has fits apparently or goes into trances or spells. Then she does her stuff. I remember thinking her name sounds like a Greek-American soccer team. Do the field telephones still work? I can call upstairs and find out what's what."

"It contradicts everything I've always believed."

"Bend a little," Wu said.

"I'm not enthused about this."

"Better than nothing."

"In fact I hate the idea."

"Skia Mantikos."

"What's that?"

"Her name," Wu said. "It means 'the shadow prophet.' "

Lester Bolin stood in a room without furniture and looked directly into the "head" of his metallic Logicon. Edna Lown in kimono and desert boots was slumped over her desk. In his hand, Lester's, was a device containing an automatic switch that operated on photoelectric command. Wu coming out of his own cubicle and heading toward the field telephones next to the first-aid unit saw Billy come out of the first-aid unit, his left thumb encircled by a fresh bandage. Softly back in bed, Mainwaring making sure his documents were packed, his file cabinet emptied out, his umbrella at the ready. The density of time enveloped everything.

"So what's with the finger?"

"Cut it when I opened my latest piece of junk mail."

"Called a paper cut," Wu said.

"Except I noticed at the last second the mail wasn't supposed to be for me. Addressed to R. H. Softly. So I dropped it in there before I fixed my cut."

"Did you see the gift I brought him from the bat cave?"

"No."

"An ancient Chinese mirror."

"What's it worth?"

"Priceless."

"That much?"

"At the very least."

"You made a big mistake," the boy said.

"Why?"

"Better not let him see it, that's all I'm saying."

"Why not?"

"He hates mirrors. He never goes anywhere near them. You better go get it before he gets back."

"He's back," Wu said.

"It's probably covered up. That's why I didn't see it. He covers them up. That's what he always does."

"Why?"

"You want to ask him?"

"I guess not."

"Where you going anyway?"

"Make a phone call."

"What, Chinese food?"

"Funny," Wu said.

"Ordering out?"

"It's this person I want to get in touch with. A desperate measure, I grant you. But she may be able to tell us what's going to happen."

Edna Lown in kimono and desert boots was slumped over her desk, thinking. Bolin stood in a nearly bare room in a storage and maintenance area next to the upper part of the elevator shaft, looking at the squat object that itself stood among scrap metal, sawdust, lengths of wire. Wu cranking a field telephone, Mainwaring testing the effectiveness of his black umbrella. In his hand, Lester's, was a device that emitted an immediate click whenever he pressed his thumb on a button. He took a coin out of his breast pocket. He didn't know what to expect. In the unlikely event that he had assembled the control system with absolute precision (unlikely because this was the first such venture he'd attempted and because it was all so homemade), the machine would be capable of producing combinations of sounds that coincided with the ideographic units he and Edna had devised as written language. Main-waring changing clothes, Softly in his bed scanning the latest mail.

 

This announcement is neither an offer to buy nor a solicitation

of an offer to sell the securities referred to below.

The offer is made only by the Prospectus, copies

of which may be obtained only from exchange

agents or designated notaries public.

AAAA&A GUANO MINES LTD.

Literally millions of shares. Price contingent upon fluctuations of world-market money curve.

 

Softly stopped reading here, thinking I am old, I will die, no one cares, her upper body slumped forward on the desk and what an implausible object it is, she thought, this material structure of mine, each of its lower extremities encased in a sodden boot, the rest of it bleakly scaled in this woebegone kimono, the photoelectric command at the end of Bolin's hand, thinking I am old, a thick-lipped gray-haired plodding woman, head resting on her arms, eyes closed, pack of cigarettes at one elbow, glasses with dark frames and round lenses at the other, Wu's middle ear conveying vibrations inward, sounds, auditory signals, the implausibility of my parts, she thought, never before so wretchedly apparent, everything pointing in a different direction and Softly thumb-sucking in bed, her momentary depression, if that's what it was, based, she believed, on the fact that she had come to the end of her "nonspecific notes," the jottings she'd been adding to for many years, the closed door of her professional life, realizing (a) that the notes indeed were finished (although she could not have said how she knew this so conclusively) and (b) that these fairly random observations were in fact the ever-circulating substance of her life's work. These investigations, these exercises in connective thought, these secret odds and ends comprised the essence of her scientific intent more than Logicon ever would. A witness to my own adventure. It was as though she had mistaken another's life for her own. Why, suddenly, did the major undertaking of her career, this neo-logistic song of the universe, seem less important than her notes, which, she well knew, were never meant to be more than probes, a series of little scribbles that might fill the off-hours. It was crazy, wasn't it? In her depression and fatigue (thinking I will die) she knew only that the notes explained her life, were that life, devices of the punchy brain inside her. It was a mistake really, what she'd always taken her life to be. That was someone else's life. This was her, Edna, belated rectifier of mistakes. To barely know the person not known to those who know me. To be in this sense a witness to my own adventure. Whose body have I been wearing all these years? Is it one body for many people or exactly the reverse? What gross colonic events, may I ask, are taking place in the area of my sigmoid flexure, Softly thought, stressing to himself the importance of such inquiries, Mainwarìng pausing here to breathe the aged and tannic fragrance of his suitcase, Edna's eyes opening on pages of notation, thinking I am old, I will die, no one cares. Bolin inserted the coin in Logicon's "navel." In his pocket, Lester's, was a piece of paper that contained: arrays of symbols; the meaning (in English, more or less) of each array; the corresponding phonetic speech units (Logicon) that the squat object would emit-that is, if Lester had assembled the machine correctly. For example, the array "/:nK" corresponded to the statement "the function letter f contains n number of f-less transforms" and both of these corresponded to the sound "fu ling ho," as Lester had worded it on paper. He stood in a storage and maintenance area looking directly into the partially exposed upper portion of his primitive android control system, which itself stood among coiled wires, sawdust, fragments of scrap metal. Lester depressed a button on the device in his hand. There was an immediate click. This wasn't as interesting, he realized with surprise, as making lists of things and then crossing the things out, one by one. As he waited to learn whether or not Logicon had an innate resistance to being spoken, something else occurred to him. If we are mohole-intense, it doesn't really matter, does it?

 

THINGS   GO   THE   OTHER  WAY

 

"Are we all here?" Softly said from his bed. "Where's Walter that son of a bitch Mainwaring with his ever-popular sylphing compounds?"

In time they assembled along the walls of Softly's quarters. Edna with a cigarette drooping from the corner of her mouth. Billy trying not to look so eager to be entertained. Lester cradling his short-wave radio. Mainwaring clean-shaven and subdued. Softly himself.

In walked Maurice Wu, halting just a yard inside the cubicle and then stepping aside, with faintly absurd politeness, as the woman appeared in the entranceway. On Maury's face was a sense of that draining tension that ghosts over the eyes and stretches the bravest smile to idiotic limits. For a moment he seemed to pose formally, as though for picture-taking. Then nodded and began.

"She's been apprised of the situation. She knows what we want to know. They have her on what they call a maximum output cycle. She's been up and at it for exactly twenty-three hours. Productive stress, they call it. Okay. What happens next is anybody's guess. She's apparently got this routine she goes into. I saw some of the preparations myself. Let's hope that's the worst of it. I guess I stop talking now and join the rest of you."

The woman wore what appeared to be a simple sheet, its ends stitched together to provide her body with rudimentary protection. Her lips were likewise stitched, literally sewn together, one of the preparations Wu had referred to. White thread hung down below her chin. Blood-crusts covered her mouth and jaw. The act of sewing and the presence of the thread itself caused her lips to jut out from her face to a grotesque extent. Impossible to judge this woman's age or place of origin. Her face, aside from the mouth, showed signs of a life clearly lacking in material comfort. Pockets of discolor. Meager sunken flesh. Eyes destitute of lenient experience. With arms bent upward she stood in the filthy sheet and stared into her curled fingers. Then she began to turn, slowly, her bare feet pressing into the earth.

They watched in silence.

Her body, performing nothing more than this slow rotation, appeared to assert the prestige of emptiness; it might take the shape of whatever swerved in its direction. She stared into her curled fingers, eyes going blank, the scant identity within them receding in nearly measurable stages. She seemed to reach a special level here; paused; then whirled, a series of rapid turns. Her body shook briefly and she fell, remaining motionless, her face in the dirt, for an extended period of time.

Under the covers Softly's hand tried without success to promote an unequivocal erection.

She began to roll in the dirt. As she did the sheet gradually parted up her back, thread becoming undone. Her face was blotted with earth and accumulating pain. All along her unwindingly pallid body, this tidal index to a madness spaced with art, were further traces of this beaten life of hers, bruises here, broken skin, indentations. Whatever was meant to happen would not involve the others in some collective ecstasy. This woman's jurisdiction, the ascendancy of her vacant gaze, was turned completely inward. Her territorial range was nil. She unraveled before them an imbecile beauty, senseless and deserted, the negative telling element of her life. This was the power of her physical presence, of these nameless spins and tremors, that she was a mind and body able to empty out and in some decompressing play of painful craft eventually to refill herself, or so it seemed to those who watched as now the sheet completely parted, woman no longer rolling, face down on the twisted sheet, arms still bent up and tucked under her now. Birthmarked on her right buttock was a star-shaped geometric figure. All watching knew it was a pentagram, secret emblem of the ancients. The woman rose to her knees, keeping her back to the others. She raised both arms in the air, hands closed. One by one then, in synchronization, she pointed the fingers of each hand upward, thumb, index finger, middle finger, pinky finger, ring finger. She did this repeatedly, beginning to moan now, and like the other things she'd done these latest exercises drew their effectiveness (no eye strayed nor mind wandered) from the very obscurity that motivated their performance. Although she was not facing her audience it became clear once more that she was reaching a special level of enactment. She moaned steadily. The muscles in her back contracted. She continued "to count" into the air, as though fashioning a correspondence between whole numbers and the systematic maze of nature. Then she lowered her arms and, using hands to help her move, turned, still on her knees, toward those watching. She tried to open her mouth. No longer content apparently to make a single unmodulated sound, she strained against the binding thread, using facial muscles alone, hands at her sides. Several stitches loosened, causing fresh blood to flow. She was in extreme pain but suggested a complex presence now, her eyes returning mild light to objects and forms. The lower part of her face was smeared with blood. She spat out loops of thread. Blood in starry drops fell to her breasts and thighs. With a last passionate grimace she freed her mouth of every lash of thread and cried through blood and teeth a single word.

"Pythagoras."

They waited for more, connected by a skein of utter dumb futility. But this was all she'd come to say. Mainwaring and Wu helped the woman to her feet, put the sheet around her and took her to the first-aid unit. With her thumb and index finger Edna Lown picked a speck of tobacco off the end of her tongue. She studied it a while, then went to her quarters. Bolin put the radio on Softly's desk and turned it on.

"I guess if we're going to find out for sure, this is the way to do it," Lester said. "Things have been going the wrong way lately. We're due for some good luck, Bobby."

Billy looked at his long-time friend and mentor.

"Just a rumor," Softly said.

Within the limitless range of intersecting static, an announcer could be heard.

"Greenwich mean time," he said. "At the tone: fourteen, twenty-eight, fifty-seven."

 

System interbreak: eclipse track Asia: children being sold in Madhya Pradesh, eating rats to live, baring trees of bark and leaves to live, external reality, flies on whitewashed walls, old men in loincloths collecting the dust of a cycle rickshaw, oblivious mud bodies, mouths edged with coated sputum, rows of sandals set around the borders of a temple courtyard, women in saris drifting through the shops wearing muslin, bone, plastic and glass, saris of handspun cotton (in bare rooms), women spaced across the upland slush of rice fields, tending dung fires, gliding past the stalls in anklet bells and bangles, a mass of pondering voices (in bare rooms reserved for menstruation), black disk abstracting the edge of the nurturing sun. People surround the outdoor kitchens waiting for their gruel and milk, eating grass to live, bodies of the starved abandoned on tiled verandas, human experience, electric fan moving air across a room adorned with flapping pictures of the gods. Monkeys vanish from a window, reacting to the soft beginnings of eclipse, the lunar shadow moving in a northeast arc, its path of totality a fairly standard band in length and width, its rate of speed routine, its time span roughly average. The eclipse is notable solely for its unexpectedness, the year's only scheduled solar eclipse (total) having already taken place (northwest U.S. and Canada), an image projected on a cardboard screen (two point seven minutes). As hypothetical ARS extant (transferred, by whatever means, from your nonquantum state Outside), you have the benefit of an omnidirectional viewpoint and are able to observe, regarding this event, that the earth along the eclipse path and its outer borders of partial darkness resembles a charred immensity, children with begging bowls, men surrendered to meditation. You enter a cell in an ashram, several monks in ochre robes, one of whom (bald, sleepy, smelling of hemp) tells his fellows about the hand-clapping Africans seized by the spirit of eclipse who beat on drums to make the sun return, who hide in their palm leaf huts, who fall into convulsions; about the medicine man who chews on bitter leaves and spits the curative pieces at assembled villagers; about the natives who cover their bodies with white clay to counter the darkness, whole villages white in this way, weepings and seizures, dancing mania, morbid homage to their lord. His fellow sadhus are amused, nodding in unison, the empirical source, children immobilized by gastroenteritis, scavenging to live, to know what passes above, this nearly sunset occurrence, shadow moving toward the eastmost Ganges, choleroid feces, choleroid dehydration, choleroid vomit, girls with finger-cymbals laughing in a mango grove, the cowrie, the owl of good fortune. It is as everywhere, the soul of one experience passing untouched through the soul of another, men with the white marks of Shiva, oxen on sparse farms. To redirect yourself from the Outside, as you're able to do (having learned to count to n), is the equivalent of entering once more your outgrown frame of logic and language. Having dismantled the handiwork of your own perceptions in order to solve reality, you know it now as a micron flash of light-scattering matter in a structure otherwise composed of purely mathematical coordinates. The blind stand begging in places that are the same, hanging wash, some goats, as places everywhere, toy stores, colored glass, the squalor that customarily surrounds the working of miracles. To breathe but not to speak, to sleep in the earth, to live in self-inflicted pain, to aspire to blindness by the sun, to speak but not to move. Children play a shadow game in last light, small birds picking insects out of human excrement, the players safe when they make their shadows disappear. There is evening raga in a music room, girls in bare feet who hide in the shadow of a water tank, the arguments of crosslegged men all fiercely disposed to the notion of suffering as macrocosmic sport, this girl and that in obliterated twilight, cries of their pursuers. You perceive completely. Women with twig brooms. Children dead in darkened archways. The girls slowly rise from their enfolding shadow, aware the game has been absorbed, all shadows subtotaled in this nightstreaming dye. A woman touching a mote of vermilion to her forehead. The insistent density of hand drums, tamboura and sarod. You see the itinerant mystic's dinner plate with its orderly dole of almonds, the real world, this man of sect marks and open sores. A student sits on a pallet repeating phrases from a textbook, his voice half prayerful with drowsiness, as everywhere, mathematics coinciding with the will to live. In cities built, the T-squared temporary cantonment, the practical means to survive, in oceans crossed (he reads) it is mathematics that makes the way for the whittler's sleight, gives directional reference to the man at the bridge rail adjusting a small-boned instrument of navigation. At the contact line of nature and mathematical thought is where things make sense, things accede to our view of them, things return to us a propagating wave of reason. On his pallet, drowsily, on pocked floorboards beneath a shuttered window, the young man mutters back to his book, a printed seed of the race no less than some Vedantic text, India (from the Sanskrit for "river") being the source of positional notation for the decimal system and of the symbols for the numbers one to nine, cane baskets on women's heads, lifelong celibates grinning out of broken teeth, children begging for a cracked fragment of biscuit, the physical universe, eating crumbs to live. Then northward here, vultures hunched in trees, the shadow curves on eventful waters, fishing boats, bamboo rafts that carry bodies dappled with jasmine and rose petals, these being children spared the pyre, and there is sandal-wood afloat. What is the universe as it exists beyond the human brain? The sadhu stands naked in his cell, body lacking hair at every point. Mathematics is what the world is when we subtract our own perceptions. In your earthly study of the subject, you went beyond its natural association with the will to live and found that it contained a painless "nonexistence," the theoretical ideal of n-space. And so you beamed into the heavens a clue to the limitations not only of (y) our science but of human identity as well, that very possession this naked monk seeks to dissolve in his methodical swallowing of the world's offal and mold. You hear the temple priests and vendors, the mendicants in wooden beads, the will to live (he reads) being an attitude embedded in the prolongation of order, a condition defined by mathematics. As everywhere, the ghosts of these experiences pass through each other, the beating of clothes on stone, sex inside mosquito nets. The shadow crosses into Bangladesh, thousands waiting on line and for each at best some pebbles of unleavened bread, control maintained by men with sticks. You read the grieving man's belief in the everydayness of the absolute. Families set down their mats and prepare to sleep on pavement, the empirical source, children stealing to live. To be Outside is to know an environment infinitely less complex than the one you left. Far from wishing to revisit misery, you are nonetheless able to experience once again some of the richness of inborn limits. You see our rapt entanglement in all around us, the press to measure and delve. There, see, in annotated ivory tools, lengths of notched wood, in the wave-guide manipulation of light and our nosings into the choreography of protons, we implicate ourselves in endless uncertainty. This is the ethic you've rejected. Inside our desolation, however, you come upon the reinforcing grid of works and minds that extend themselves against whatever lonely spaces account for our hollow moods, the woe incoming. Why are you here? To unsnarl us from our delimiting senses? To offer protective cladding against our cruelty and fear? The pain, the life-cry speak our most candid wonders. To out-premise these, by whatever tektite whirl you've mastered, would be to make us hypothetical, a creature of our own pretending, as are you. Geometric space of any number of dimensions. Awareness of not being self-aware. The metaphysical release at the center of the value-dark dimension. Intones the bony old man sannyasa in his scrambled loincloth sannyasa mud body oblivious to the vast ashen inevitability of all things that pertain to his particular snag of earth. With burial grounds full, people deposit bodies in shallow graves long bared by local dogs. Tourists photograph the corpses, human experience, scheduled collections made of bodies in the street. The shadow passes into the state of Assam, leaving behind these trophy bones of epic death, families sitting in the dust outside a feeding center, external reality, their eyes suspended forever in this medium of exaggerated nutrient humanity, surrounded as they wait by clamor, lamentation, audible drone of sacred names, as everywhere, all the plain-weave variations of supplicating noise, shadow moving swiftly into map-blue China, system of hushed assumptions.

 

Robert Hopper Softly in a natty black suit stood in a patch of bedazzling grass, briefcase in hand, a modernistic pair of dark glasses covering much of his face. Finally the somber prow of a limousine appeared at the top of the ramp that coiled on down to the main garage beneath the cycloid structure. As the Cadillac leveled out and moved slowly toward him, Softly found himself straightening up a bit, as though trying to occupy more fully some spectral frame of authoritarian ethics.

Something here made no sense. If, as the youngest of his colleagues had very recently stated, the lunar shadow first touched the earth at the universal (or Greenwich mean) time announced on the radio, and if only half an hour had passed from that moment to this, and if it was therefore midafternoon at the prime meridian, why, considering his (Softly's) position in terms of longitude east of Greenwich, wasn't it nighttime here? Not the deviant night of total solar eclipse but simple ordinary everyday night, the interval of darkness that accounts for an important part of every twenty-four hour period during which the earth completes a single rotation on its axis. Noncognate celestial anomaly living up to its name. Even if it wasn't getting on to night, it was definitely getting on to eclipse. Yes he sensed the shadow speeding toward him.

The driver brought the car to a complete stop. The man next to the driver leaned out the window toward Softly.

"I don't know about doing this."

"Open the door and let me in."

"You're not on the docket," the driver said.

"I don't have time to argue."

"We have a pickup to make in the other direction with delivery here."

"I want to go east."

"That's just it," the other man said.

"I'm anxious to get going."

"In the other direction there'd be no problem taking you," the driver said. "Being that's the way we're headed."

"Open the door," Softly said.

"If you were on the docket, we'd try to work things out."

"I'm suffering."

"In what sense suffering?"

"In the sense that I feel enmeshed in extreme unpleasantness."

The man nearest Softly turned toward the driver.

"He said he's suffering. Then he defined it."

"I heard."

"It's out of our way, where he wants to go. It's in completely the wrong direction."

"How far in miles?"

The man turned toward Softly.

"How far is it where you want to go in completely the wrong direction in miles?"

He stood in the dim light at the top of the elevator shaft and watched the guano buckets rising diagonally on aerial tramways, each container about the size of a living room, brimming with product.

"Get ready to jump out."

"When?"

"When we get there."

"Aren't you being premature?"

"Because I'm barely stopping."

Softly in the middle of the back seat looked straight ahead, fearful that even a brief glance out the side window might reveal an early trace of shadow. He was trying not to think clearly. This was a self-protective maneuver he used whenever confronted with the kind of dismal insight that caused twinges of professional shame. It was deplorably obvious, the matter he was trying not to think about. The eclipse, in a strictly logical sense, was no cause for fear, alarm, anxiety or dread, despite its unscheduled nature. Logically there is no connection between events. To believe otherwise is to fix oneself to a mystical intuition. An unforeseen eclipse is no more startling, logically, than an eclipse predicted decades or centuries earlier. That the latter event will take place is sheer conjecture. He knew this as surely as the fact that he was in distress. The mohole totality itself in no way contradicted the postulates of logical thought.

How, knowing this so surely, did I manage to forget it?

It wasn't forgetfulness, he realized, but a deeper than logical fear that drove him into flight. Fear (perhaps) of eclipse per se. A wish to bang on hollow objects. A need to chew the fleshy leaves of aloe plants. An impulse to hide oneself more fundamentally than was possible in the antrum. It wasn't his logic that had broken apart, or the world itself, but something more essential to the spiritual fact that bracketed his existence. He had never been in the path of a total eclipse. He had read about but never experienced the chill in the air, the cunning onset of dark, the sight of white villages, of animals seeking their nighttime roosts or holes, of nocturnal creatures stirring in the fugitive gloom, the general motivating tendency being one of rapid physical adaptation to a mistimed event. Was it possible that nothing more than his body had been deceived? If so, did it not follow that the phrase "nothing more than" referred, in successive reflections, only to itself? Of course, he thought, we continue to lack basic evidence that an eclipse is indeed taking place. With no simple rigid structure of judgmental data, we .

can't be sure it won't turn out in the end to be nothing more than rumor.

Keep believing it, shit-for-brains.

He took off the dark glasses, put them in the breast pocket of his suit coat and got down on hands and knees. The wind seemed to be subsiding. It was still light, still light. Some forewarning mechanism made him begin to crawl, knowing, everywhere, feeling it, a sense of violated space, the air itself infused with this infrared surprise. Experimentally he made some sounds. Huge cylinders full of guano moved diagonally through the dimness, powder rising in clouds. He climbed into the Cadillac.

He sat in the middle of the back seat, sweating incandescently, feeling as though his body were covered with pond scum. He lifted the briefcase onto his lap and felt around inside for the old glue bottle that contained his most extreme deliriant, a sudsy composite of lighter fluid, paint thinner, airplane glue, nail polish remover and several types of aerosol propellant. With some effort he removed the old-fashioned rubber cap (with brush attached). Then he held the sticky rim of the bottle right under his nose. He inhaled deeply several times, sitting primly in the geographic center of the back seat, his lids descending slowly behind the glasses.

"I think I see it," the driver said.

"In what sense do you mean that?" the other man said.

Softly nodding briefly into history pondered unopposed (by his own precedent) the mock battles that were fought in old Egypt and Mesopotamia to accompany the conflict suggested by various celestial events. In this way the crisis of time (of light that fades and season that ends) was made specific and personal, detached from abstraction. People translated the event into the sweating arcs of their own bodies, perhaps trying to act beyond their fear, inventing games to fill this crevice in the heavens. The briefcase was between his feet. He tapped his fingers on his knees. Fumes, nausea, salty moisture. Deciding to address the driver he opened his mouth slowly, half expecting to see a bubble emerge.

" 'We' 'are' 'here.' "

"Repeat," the driver said.

" 'It' 'is' 'time' 'for' 'me' 'to' 'get' 'out.' "

"I don't think my ears are hearing."

" 'Stop' 'the' 'car.' "

The wind was fairly strong. He handed his briefcase through the open window to the man at the passenger's end of the front seat. He stood for a moment a few feet from the car. He heard it start, turn and move off. Then he walked across the grass, still some light, and realized he was lurching even more than usual. He kept his head down. When he got to the edge of the hole he paused, syllogist of dire night.

"My ears hear."

The hole was roughly rectangular in shape. One side was less steep than the others and he chose this surface for his descent. He entered the hole more or less sitting down, his feet before him performing braking maneuvers, his hands employed to balance. At the bottom he stood up and brushed off the seat of his pants. He took off the dark glasses, put them in the breast pocket of his suit coat and got down on hands and knees. The wind seemed to be subsiding. It was still light, still light. Some forewarning mechanism made him begin to crawl, knowing, everywhere, feeling it, a sense of violated space, the air itself infused with this infrared surprise. Experimentally he made some sounds. He crawled the full length of the hole and entered the hole's hole. The tunnel began to slant downward as he moved into extreme darkness. The hole was low and narrow. He began to crawl faster. The rate of inclination gradually increased. His fingers scratched at the hard dirt. He made more sounds. There were sectors so narrow he had to chop and claw at the dirt walls to give himself room to move forward. The darkness was total now. His hand touched something cold and hard and he picked it up, a length of barely pliable metallic wire, twisted at one end, curved sharply at the other as if to fit over a hook or rod. He used it to clear the dirt in narrow areas, crawling faster now, the slope angling ever down. His hands felt scraps of clothlike material, thin strands of it, littered here and there along the floor of the hole. He moved forward into a large and slyly constructed object, human (it would seem) and covered (his hand determined) by whole cities of vermiculate life. Softly did not pause further to investigate for signs of pulse, heartbeat, so on. He crawled directly over the human object and straight into a solid mass of dirt. Again he did not pause. Using both hands he gouged out chunks of heavy earth. He made noises and sounds. His fingers scratched and clawed to clear a passage. He used the curved metallic object on areas where the dirt was firmest. The angle of descent was very severe. He continued to dig the hole's hole. The sounds he uttered became by degrees more rudimentary and crude. He crawled, knowing, he scratched at dirt, he clawed the hard earth, everywhere, feeling it, a sense of interlocking opposites, the paradox, the comedy, the fool's rule of total radiance.

Zorgasm.

On the surface another figure moved, this one on a white tricycle, heading the same way the Cadillac had come, madly pedaling, a boy a bit too large for his chosen means of transportation, knees bowed outward, elbows high and wide, head drawn into torso, his thumb on the small bell attached to the handlebar. He wore a jacket and tie. A measured length of darkness passed over him as he neared the hole and then he found himself pedaling in a white area between the shadow bands that precede total solar eclipse. This interval of whiteness, suggestive of the space between perfectly ruled lines, prompted him to ring the metal bell. It made no sound, or none that he could hear, laughing as he was, alternately blank and shadow-banded, producing as he was this noise resembling laughter, expressing vocally what appeared to be a compelling emotion, crying out as he was, gasping into the stillness, emitting as he was this series of involuntary shrieks, particles bouncing in the air around him, the reproductive dust of existence.

 

About   the  Author

 

Don DeLillo, who was born in 1936 in New York, is the author of nine highly acclaimed novels including Great Jones Street, Players, Ratner's Star, Running Dog, and The Names (all available in Vintage Contemporaries editions).