by Greg Egan
My sample point is far distant from their tiny huddle, but nobody notices that I am wrapped mummy-style in metallic foil which is glowing with a faint purple light. Perhaps they are matting me out.
Home now, lying on my bed, editing but more rearranging than discarding. I don’t know what to do with the opening shot. Does it mean anything, or is it just a product of my inevitable nervousness? Still I cannot decide on any final interpretation, so I cannot be happy with any final juxtaposition. The untidiness of my impressions nags at me, but it is a good nagging, and along with the voice which says: don’t leave it this way, fix it up at once! is another which says: take a lot of care with this, think slowly, think a lot.
I hardly notice the next morning arrive, until I see that I am standing in the middle of the Western Quadrangle and every one of those loudspeakers is emitting a piercing wail. Think what they could do to revolutionise stereo sound with a set-up like this!
As the noise subsides my mind clears. It is Tuesday morning and we are going to our first classes. I reach into my shirt pocket (what foil?) , find my timetable, take a single frame of it which I file with great care, and then throw the piece of paper into a bin. I have English now in Room H. I can barely contain my excitement.
Wonderfully simple scheme gives rooms on the ground numbers, rooms upstairs letters. This means that I have to get upstairs.
Upstairs is reached by one of the strange staircases. One flight of stairs goes half the distance, to a landing, from which two separate flights complete the distance. The lower flight can be used going up or down (take nothing for granted) but the upper flights are one-way, the rule being: keep to the left. How do I know this? On my very first ascent I use the wrong branch and a squat minotaur angrily explains the rule to me. I thank him and start to walk away.
—Go back down and come up again the right way!
he says, and I am tempted to mischievously misinterpret his words and thus repeat my former illegality, but he fumes so dangerously that I do not. The rule could easily be explained with signs or enforced by putting one-way turnstiles as used in supermarkets at the tops and bottoms of the upper flights. For some reason they have not chosen to do either.
Lines are forming outside and I join. Girls closest to the room always happens automatically, by instinct. The lines forming remind me of a DNA helix unwinding, but it doesn’t mean anything, so I drop it. Sadly.
I sense evil in the quadrangle below. Looking over the balcony I catch a glimpse of a Dalek creeping unnoticed towards an exit. I am forced to zoom (I’m too petrified to send a viewpoint from my body) but it is worth it as I catch a close-up of the glinting salt-shaker swivelling its weapon about in a paranoid frenzy. Then I call out:
—Hey, look out down there!
Annoyingly, nobody down there hears, and the Dalek just slips through the doorway, out of the quadrangle, to some unsuspecting destination.
I look up to see our English teacher about a metre away. Looking angry. She has short black hair, large green eyes, a very straight, very red mouth, is in her late twenties, and resembles a cat. She is angry!
—How dare you! How dare you lean over that balcony and shout! Who the hell do you think you are?! That balcony just belongs to me, you understand, to me! And nobody, but nobody, leans over it and shouts without my explicit permission!
I glide backwards a few steps and give her a slow, deep, sweeping bow, all the time keeping my eyes fixed coldly on hers, saying:
—Please accept my most humble apologies, your ladyship. You have my word of honour that nobody will ever defile your balcony again without your explicit permission.
In my best Malcolm McDowell voice.
Actually, I look sheepish and move away from the balcony.
In the classroom on green plastic sweating bucket seats comes an outline of the year packed with comprehension and essays and poems and debates and one boy anxiously takes notes of it all, page after page, as if hoping to finish the year’s work in his spare time after school that day.
Most of the rest of the class sleeps.
No more cyanide suicides, of course; the audience will not swallow that more than once.
And the speakers wail and Social Studies comes next.
—Wait to be dismissed, you arrogant bastards!
In Room 18 a frail old man (late nineties I guess) sits at the desk, quite motionless, and decaying in places. He is a telepath, and talks to us without moving his mummified mouth. He tries to read our minds, and this makes me angry, so I defend the entire class of strangers with a universally permeating mind barrier. This annoys the old man but he is too old and tired to defeat me, and I even manage to conceal my identity from him with very little effort. If he discovered who was frustrating him, he could summon powers far more dreadful than those of his shrivelling brain. From some things only bland anonymity is sufficient protection.
We will be studying Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece this term, broadcasts Ancient Mr Dennis. After a short paper-plane fight it is morning recess. The students rush from the class, but he must sit there at his desk, he will fall apart if he moves. I’d like to cry for him, but.
I decide to cling to the ceiling above the canteen queue and take a wide-angle shot of the customers below.
I am amazed at the amount of money the average purchaser spends. A cheese cake and a carton of chocolate milk. Two cream buns and a pint of orange juice. A dozen sausage rolls. Strawberry jelly and coke. Avocado yoghurt and lemonade. Extrapolating on the assumption of average conditions, ten dollars a week on snacks per person. If not for my position I would throw up. Well, I could do so anyway, it would be a nice shot. And an apt comment. But there might be (gasp!) Consequences, of the kind I don’t want.
One especially good sequence shows a boy, his face lined with rolls of fat that surely cannot be real, but must be part of a rubber mask, or inserted objects, surgical implants for some unfathomable purpose, leave the serving window with his arms cradling a monstrous pile of custard tarts and cream buns. He walks blindly into a pillar and drops the whole lot.
Without the smallest sign of anger or despair he walks back to the window and begins to repeat his purchase, thumbing through a thick wad of five-dollar bills.
Assorted teachers stroll around the grounds with saucers and cups of tea, small halos of second-year girls around the younger male teachers.
Again the wail of the surround-sound siren, and it is time for Maths.
The teacher is young but balding, tall with fish eyes, nearly transparent. We are given a huge stack of government-issue textbooks printed on toilet paper. The pages smell and feel like old, dirty pavement. Number theory, set theory, geometric theory.
Made dull by experts on dullness. Bring on the animated graphics. Maybe they will, when that has become dull too.
Science Room Q is lined with jars and flasks but most of the jars contain the same thing and the flasks are all empty, except for a little moist dust and dead flies. The gas outlets on the black benches are stuffed full of pencil leads and chewing gum. The short fat science teacher is also a telepath but he is very, very weak and uses it only to discover which students in the class hate his guts. Again I am angered by such violation, and my screen makes him happy because he thinks we are all indifferent to him.
And then it is lunchtime with strictly defined strictly policed eating areas for each year to prevent cultural shock from mixing.
Now the canteen dispenses pies and pasties and hamburgers and hotdogs, all with shrivelled green apples accompanying them, for Health.
Assorted teachers stroll around the grounds with waxed-paper lunches resting on brown-paper bags, small halos of second-year girls around the younger male teachers.
Pairs of convicts carrying large metal bins around to groups of eating students stare resentfully at the unshackled. Aimed papers always miss, and the bearers limp about picking them up under the amused bored eyes of supervising staff.
Bet it makes them into solid citizens t
hough.
Another sonic punctuation mark indicates that we have just stopped eating and should now wander meaninglessly around the grounds, go into the library and read Asterix comics, or play a combination of cricket and rugby on the oval.
The library is like a public bar. When someone finally becomes so noisy and disorderly that nobody else can be noisy and disorderly in their own individual way (surely an appalling infringement of basic human rights) then that person is kicked out. Other merrymakers can then make merry in (relative) peace.
I stroll along the edge of the oval. With frightening regularity, hard red balls hit the bitumen in front of me.
—Over here!
—Throw it here, mate!
—Chuck us the ball, you bastard!
I wisely ignore all competing cries and leave them to scramble for the hard red balls themselves.
And then it is time for Physical Education. This is like the Army, only even sillier. During the two periods we roll up and down the hill at the end of the oval, then we run around in circles, then we try to connect various widely-spaced parts of our anatomies. I have a sneaking suspicion that this strange training is designed with some goal quite removed from our physical well-being in mind; perhaps we are all to be extras in an orgy scene for Caligula II. This is virtually confirmed when we are told to climb up on each other’s shoulders and charge into each other chaotically, until a group of human beings is reduced to a panting, twitching pile of flesh. I catch a glimpse of one of the phys ed teachers filming us with a bright blue plastic camera, cheap and nasty Super 8. How degrading! I fog the film.
Afternoon recess lasts five minutes for changing books. Unsatisfied with the lockers provided, I have installed a Chubb safe. With not a little dismay I find that it has been blown open by a direct hit from a hydrogen bomb. Brushing away fall-out I find that luckily none of the books inside has been damaged. I will install a new safe in the morning.
Woodwork explains tools and machines and basic procedures especially safety aspects. There is wood-dust in the air and there are woodshavings and wood-chips coating every surface in the room, making me sneeze fine pine particles into my handkerchief every five minutes. This will be fun.
Days coalesce into weeks, muddily, for their edges are poorly defined. They surrender their identities to the larger beings. I have kilometres of film, but most of it is very dull. There is the French class with too few students to be worth a teacher, so nous jetons avions de papier autour la salle. I read the textbook and learn a little, but with no teacher my accent is unbelievably bad.
There is the Technical Drawing class which gives me a few ideas for computer animation but the objects we draw are all so boring: nuts and bolts and stylised building-block buildings. There is the Art class which I hate because my hands have never been interested in the strange obsessions of my eyes. I would be quite happy to live without hands, for I do not need to hold a camera or a microphone to make my films.
There is the Scripture class consisting of all non-Catholics, which is led in solemn private study of whatever we wish by a grumpy, radiation-diseased Physics teacher, for no local minister has the time (tenacity (trauma-toughness)). There is our weekly period in our form room, when we play cards. Few people in my form are in my lessons, for the student body is dissected in a different way for every different occasion. There is the weekly Health Education period: diet and diarrhoea and gonorrhea. There is Metalwork, which consists solely of taking large pieces of metal and filing them into large piles of fine shiny dust which adheres to the lubricating grease which is everywhere in the room. I ask why we do this, and I am told that it is training for what goes on in the factories, which is fair enough. I am not permitted to whistle in Metalwork, but I do not ask if whistling is permitted in factories.
This is how I spend my days, in exchange for things I do not need, things I do not want, but what else can I do?
—Duck!
shrieks the rabbit, coming straight out of the sun and passing an inch above my cowering form. What does he want (mean (plan (change)))?
It is very hard to make lumps when everything is so cyclic and several weeks (precisely) might shoot past in a subjective instant (exactly), and I would notice no change at all. Subjective space-time is a strange place to navigate, but it is the only manifold that really matters (cheer up Minkowski, nobody’s perfect) and I need beacons, regions of high experience-density which I can see from afar to determine just where I am and where I’m going. If I wander too far along my world-line without leaving lumps behind like crumbs in the forest, then I will end up with nothing in sight, and the featureless region around me will be free to distort, to expand and contract as it chooses, and living will be like walking blind down a huge intestine with no idea of my speed, position, or destination.
Lumps are very, very important.
Sometimes I can still detect the lump of my conception, and more often that of my birth, but such sightings are rare and growing less frequent. The lumps of my earliest childhood form a tiny but perfect jewel-like constellation, formed as best as I could to mimic that of my womb-time. I tried to form the pattern a third time, but botched it, which sometimes makes me very sad.
I wonder about the lump of death. Will it be so bright as to obscure all those which came before? Will it be a single point, or an awesome, complex structure? What colour will it be? What colour is death?
—What colour is death?
I ask my Art teacher.
—We’re using charcoal today, so it doesn’t matter.
How can I put up with this?
—Hold your breath!
yells the rabbit who merrily melts the polar ice and floods the planet.
If his aim is to help me make lumps then he is not doing too well, as his lightning-fast pranks are strangely insubstantial and I seem to forget them almost as soon as they are over. If only I could catch him and ask him a few questions. There doesn’t seem to be much chance of that. He moves so quickly.
Chapter 2
CARNIVAL ATMOSPHERE
—Attendance at the carnival will be compulsory. Students are to remember that this is a normal school day.
Now that’s not quite true. Carnivals, I discover, are very, very different from normal school days. So why complain? It’s not that I don’t welcome the lumps (especially as I hope to have a basic reference grid (a ‘constellation’ in my more sentimental moments) constructed by the end of term). It’s just that there are some lumps which make me wonder if it’s worth it.
—Ineluctable duality of experience
comments Mr Callow over the public address system.
The swimming carnival is an extremely divisive event.
Firstly, we are split into factions (my dictionary thinks that these are generally subversive, but alas it is not the case): four groups named after worthy local historical (i.e. dead) persons. Each faction is associated with a colour, the idea being that students can perceive the fact of their group identity on a primitive sensory level, without any need for inconvenient and undesirable higher cerebral intervention.
Secondly, we are split according to function into three groups. Competitors are wonderful, enthusiastic, vibrant, and alive people, potential Olympic gold medallists, Rhodes scholars, MHRs, senators, Rotary Club presidents; proud, loyal citizens who give unselfishly to their community of their time, effort, and high spirits. Cheering-squad members are quite wonderful, pretty enthusiastic, fairly vibrant, and supportive people, potential Oscar winners, law students, senior public servants, company directors, Rotary Club vice-presidents; reliable, sincere citizens who devote themselves to their community with commitment, energy, and level-headed vigour.
The remainder, the unwilling spectators, are unpleasant, unco-operative, dull, and disruptive people, potential communists, environmentalists, homosexuals, authors, union leaders, criminals, rock singers; sick, alienated people who either ignore or disturb the community with their protests, cynicism, and rash actions.
/> The net result of this is a partition into twelve groups. I am still searching for a precise but understandable image to apply to this constant splitting-up into competing units. We are supposed to take it all seriously. We are meant to act as if the divisions were fundamental, important, immutable. Why? For the competitors/cheering-squad members/spectators split I may use something about wheat and chaff, although this only describes a separation into two parts. I think that is good enough, in this case.
Weather is of course perfectly fine (and always).
Buses are of course slightly late but not late enough to do any good (and always).
I leave a viewpoint wandering about the empty school, sneaking up on cleaners playing Class in deserted rooms, mocking the teachers with as much ferocity as any student. Cleaners are not permitted in the staff room, but are given their own strange, small closets about the school, a separate race kept quiet and nearly invisible, too close to the real nature of What Comes After to be allowed to occupy the minds of the students.
I sit at the very back of the bus and watch the place recede. I eclipse its surroundings, but no strange, sick light spills out from it. Whatever is the source of that is coming with us. I shudder and let in the sunlight.
The public have been excluded from a local swimming pool just for this ridiculous event, and they cling to the barbed-wire fences in their pathetic, ragged swimming costumes, as if hoping for hand-outs of chlorinated water.
—Why don’t you go to the beach?
yells one student insolently, but this has no effect on them at all. They just stare at us with wide, accusing eyes and speak to us with proud, accusing silences. You have to respect them, even though they are clearly unable to help themselves, or at least are too accustomed to their lassitude to break their lazy habits.
