Errata
Page 8
So he opens the Law before him again, & he begins to flick the pages. He barely glances at the laws already written there, knowing it all so thoroughly after an eternity as the city’s legislative head. When he reaches the last page he replaces his glasses & picks up his pen. He starts to scribble over the rule written on his blotter, scoring out the end of it.
There is only one rule, and it defines.
•
The lawscribe has inscribed so many propositions into the Law it is a highly complex thing by now; and for all that his knowledge & understanding of it has grown with his continual scrutiny & study, for all that he half believes he could rewrite it all from memory if it were lost—or look in a mirror & copy it from the reflection, written in the wrinkles on his face—he has come to believe the Law can never be both totally consistent & complete. He has seen the rule that says so, indeed, & written that rule into the Law. Stamped it TRUE, even though it saddened him; he has lost some of the passionate idealism he began his work with since he realised that the Law can never then be perfect, only approach perfection.
But now he looks at the blank page before him, sees a neatness in it, a summation that discards the relevance of all those contradictions. The others of the unkin host would cry out to see him do this—they’d say his mind has snapped, & it’s quite possible it has—but the simplicity is too elegant to deny. So he puts pen to paper & begins to write:
There is only one rule.
Then he sits back, smiles to himself, & closes the great leatherbound tome of the Law just as the Watch Tower bell rings out the city’s—
DOOM
Of Ocean Wandering & Gods as Anchors
Everywhere the watchman looks, the shell of the Vellum is collapsing back into the core in sinks of energy, or cooling, stilling, chilling to wastelands of empty entropy. He tries to tell himself that past the scope of all, beyond reality’s horizon, the cosmos could be vast & curved, that even now the metaphysiques of other universes might be carving their own mark upon it, that this Vellum crumbling under & around them could be just one little island of an archipelago afloat upon the chaosphere, other firmaments emerging even as theirs falls.
Might the city sail around the cosmos to another settlement of time & space? Might this, indeed, be how they first arrived here in this afterworld, the source of those strange stories told in taverns on the docks, stories of ocean wandering & gods as anchors.
•
But that imagination gives him little comfort. The stone walls of the tower are falling, taking most of the workings with them as they rumble down to rubble below. Under him grilled gantries & sproinged springs of spiral stairway hang all broken down the tower’s height, fragments of helix locked into a wireframe cylinder of girders. It is the last of days, he’s trapped, & he has failed his task, the bell still tolling & the orrery still spinning—neither now, though, bound to the tick-tock of measured time.
The glassy glittering waltz of light that is the Houri’s Eye swirls out beyond the tower’s confines now, unbound by tracks & trails, its swirl ever-expanding.
•
We alight on the teleoscope which rattles loosely as we land, the inner tube come off its threads & sliding up & down with every tilt of it. From his cold perch, back against the pillar, buffeted by winds, the watchman looks at us, or at the scope, or at the seat perhaps, which has somehow survived the rain of stone around it. Too far to leap, too near to not consider it, tilted precariously but clearly snagged-up in a tangle of brass, it sits there empty, with the teleoscope still pointed at the centre of the orrery, looking into the whenever at the city’s heart. A sudden creak, a slant of a gantry, & we flitter up into the air just as the scope unbalances, swings with enough momentum to unthread a screw, escapes its mount, & tumbles down & down & down &—
Ah well. In the inner pocket of his jacket, a hipflask presses against the watchman’s ribs. He takes it out, unscrews the cap.
•
Looking into the scattered, shattered vortex of the Houri’s Eye, he watches shapes & shades of illogic strafe & shift the city’s streets into volutes like ink drops in a glass of water. Events in flow, endless involutions—maybe order itself is just an offshoot of this chaos. So maybe something will emerge out of the ruins.
He takes a slug of bitter firewater, of hope.
To a new cosmos, he thinks, born out of a core of chaos. And before long, as the liquid heats his heart, he’s smiling to think of Chance as sovereign, unbound by the artifice of destiny. Fortune as a gambler’s girl, unfaithful but seductive, sweet & ruinous in her semblance of integrity, of pattern, form. Fates with threads of song instead of twine. And looking out at a city where gods & men ever slaughter each other on the streets, he’s thinking, maybe the mysteries of a chaotic world will have less need of wars of light & dark to form a fine figure of a man in the clashing chiaroscuro of his—
DOOM.
The Fabulous, Formless Dream
The craftsmith strokes his chin. This new chart is most interesting, its ideas & theories gathered from a range of fields—from biopsychology, socio-anthropology, artificial lingustics. The resultant model of a modular & homeostatic system, part dynamics, part mechanics, seems a logical & subtly simple theory of the mind, with will & nerve hardwired.
He traces the branching of the races & has to admit some small respect for the dustcrawlers; without humans there could never have been unkin, so it seems. He’s not even entirely sure that the distinction could be classed as racial. Just a few recessive genes to separate them, carrying the angel out & up into the Vellum as the Cant bursts loose within, leaving the human crawling in the dust with a potential they can never quite realise. He pities them really, & he’s fascinated by their similarities. It’s a pity that they’re such a threat.
•
There are those of the host who argue that to try & grave the humans into docility is insane. That they should simply wipe them out. He’s sure however that in time he can decrypt, describe & re-inscribe the full features & functions of the mind &, like a spiritual surgeon, carry out the bypass operation that’s required. The capacity to tessellate ideas is not the only thing must be excised, but he knows—yes, he knows—if they can cut the latent Cant out of humanity at large the creatures will be little more than slaves in seraph servitude. The bitmites will lose interest in these shambling naked apes mute as the shabtis in the fields. There’s a snag however.
In a corner of his office stands a mock-up, a display removed for maintenance. A black winged figure stands on perspex glacier, a long-dead graveman of the caves reborn as the first birdman of illusion’s fields—another artefact, in a way, like all these ivory & stone & wood & bone intrications of weaponry & abodes around him. It seems to watch him as he lifts the little leatherbound book that’s circulating in the streets these days & causing so much strife. The Book of All Hours.
•
The thing looks like nonsense when it’s opened at first, incoherent, inchoate, but… after a while of reading there’s a strange cohesion to it. The words are jumbled things—riverrun & passencore & such—confusions with no single meaning; rather it’s as if the meaning of the parts is made out of the meaning of the whole. The reader has to read it… outside-in, let the senseless prosody, the seeming gibberish of poetry & idiom wash over them until the thresholds of the theme come clear. Reaching the end of it, he’d known that there was sense in there, not built of blocks to be constructed, but rather in the singularity of it, the text as a whole. The end is the starting point & only in understanding that does it begin to break down into acts then chapters, sections, paragraphs then sentences of sorts &, finally, into the words & morphemes that can be decrypted. He hefts it in his hand, this enigmatic & infuriating text.
•
He flips a sheet of celluloid over the model, lays the book down on a corner of it, picks a marker pen up & starts to sketch & scribble this suprasegmental force within the mind, this feat
ure of the Cant whose very function seems to be to tear apart the sense of sense & recombine it in new forms, new themes, new understandings of the textures of reality. This is what he has to wipe out, this angel of eugenics, the fabulous, formless dream that shapes it all.
Outside, the bell of the Watch Tower strikes again:
DOOM.
Coiling Sinews Round a Serpent Soul
Even with the leather padding under & behind him, the watchman feels the tower’s quiet answer to the wind that blows around it, the hum of resonance, vibrations tickling down his spine in shivers, coiling sinews round a serpent soul. We would not interfere with the fall of it all, the destiny of destiny, but we could make the end less harsh, we reckoned, watching him huddle against his pillar. So with a bit of nip & nibble, we brought a ladder down this way, a strut down that way, wove him a path of wreckage to crawl down to comfort; he sits now in the teleoscope seat, slugging every so often from his hipflask. The tower sways, side to side & to & fro, a metronome loosed to tick in a tempo without rhyme or reason; it will not be long now before it sways itself into collapse.
•
Far below in the plazza, black dots of citizenry stop & start in ebbs & flows, rushing in to swirl around as onlookers to the calamity, falling back in flight from the catastrophe, as a wave washes over & water trickles away & off the tilting deck of a ship. Slowly gone & fastly come, faster-forward & so-slow rewound—already some are frozen as statues, others flickering like fireflies as the city streets sweep out of synch. Lights flicker on & off in windows, stream down streets, rivers of light running out to the edges of the city where it’s hard to tell now when the city ends & the spiralling silversea of singularities begins, the one so deeply embedded in the other, emergent from it or remerging with it.
•
He imagines the stevedores at the docks, shucking aprons, picking up their coats, punching timecards, slipping back all of a sudden to be at work again, apron on as they unload the last crate of the night, rushing forward again then, arms in coatsleeves, out the door, & in the tavern with a beer, drawn back out to the street then forward to the bar, to the brothel, to the window of the dreamwhore’s room as they hear the great doom of the bell & then back to a joke, a smoke, a beer in the bar, & then forward & out, in & out, & again, & then standing there now, as the doom resounds, standing down in the rubble of the fallen watchtower.
•
We wonder if he understands it now from the breathless height of his crow’s nest. No more strict reckonings of time, no more ticks & tocks as definitions of the minutiae, only challenges & checks & questionings of uncertainty, with existence as the only answer, life articulated in a liquid language of moods, modalities. No musts, only mights & shoulds & coulds & woulds.
— In the end, we whisper to him, even the dark has its own death, and destiny its—
DOOM.
A Language Whispered in Aromas
— Is alright, he says. Is good now.
The sandminer tries to shake his wife off but she pulls him indoors, yammering in her Irim Quarter dialext about crazy blind boys brought home for no reason—trouble is! all trouble! He pulls her into his arms even as she slams the door to the back yard shut, hand in her hair to smell it, nose in her neck to smell their scents so deep & structured, aye, & the balancing of strengths & weakness of their immunities, it makes so much sense now, aye, all mingling—the scent of illnesses she’s beaten, of diseases he himself might fall to, scents of them both locking together in harmony, bonding like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, opposites attracting, strengths & weaknesses in balance. He understands it without words like pheromone or immunity, but he does understand it, all the secrets of scent unlocked by his plunge into the boy’s mosaic of experience. It might not be romantic, of course, but if that’s why he turned his head to look at the girl behind him on the tram that day, well, feh, how could it not fill him with wonder to think of the mysteries of a language whispered in aromas below the threshold of awareness.
He laughs as she tries to shake some sense into him—aye, as if he’s not been shaken into sense himself.
•
He looks at his darling’s face—not just his wife, but as much his darling as the day they met—clasped in his hands, but he can hardly see her for the harmonics of colour singing like voices, melodies snatched as someone passes you whistling in a crowded street, or the clapping of hands in an audience in a music hall. It’s a symphony of sight, her pretty face, seen not with all the structuring mechanics of forms & functions like an engineer but, aye, as a tear that’s a drop of water falling past a flap of wings & down to shatter on a blade of grass & soak into the earth, into the soil, where it’s sucked up into roots, stem, leaves, evaporating out into the air only to fall again, rain into a stream of drops, shattered to molecules rolling under & over in a babble of riverrun into ocean thick with salt & moonbeat on the waves sunrising water into vapour, into air & into furling cumulated clouds of steam & recondensing cooler into a drop of water falling past—
— Is good now, he says.
He can only just make enough sense of his sight to see the way she’s staring at him, horrified.
•
Out in the yard, in a world of change, the boy is singing light into a trinity of primal colours, shaping it with ups & downs of pitch, but also lefts & rights, forwards & backs. It’s a song of edges, abstract geons, aspect snapshots, objects in motion, & more, so much more. O, it has shape like the joints of furniture or bodies, or of acts, events.
The sandminer tries to catch his breath, as his wife pushes him back from the door, plants herself across it. It’s like he’s got some book in a foreign language, in an unknown alphabet, open before him, utterly unfathomable, aye, but with a voice in his ear translating all those strange symbols into his native tongue, into Red & Salt & Hot & Loud. It’s as if the way he’s seen the world till now were just as arbitrary as the runiform marks of black ink on white paper used by scribes to signify this sound or that. And it’s as if he’s known that all along, aye, all along known there’s another way to see the world & speak of it, sing of it. Sing it. And he’s remembering it now, aye.
The Cant.
•
Fields of illusion. Folds of delusion in the Vellum. An elusive, lucid dream-time of allusions & elisions. The bitmites, artificers of sensation, forgers of imagination, hammering it into foresight & recall. And out in the yard—he pulls his darling wife aside, has to see, to remember, to know—outside the door he opens now, the boy sits in his strange construct of symbols schemed & structured in a sacred secret sculptural musaic inscripticate all over with the signatures of sense. And the sylph of a soul as the symbol in the centre of it all.
And the sandminer, this rough working everyman, he staggers out across the doll’s heads & the broken mirrors to fall on his knees before the boy & join the lad’s high & wavering voice with his own gruff song, because all it takes is to remember how.
Before long he hears his darling joining in & it’s like the song their bodies used to sing in the slide of skin against skin back when they were first courting, their heartbeats heard & felt as a drumbeat, as a delicate but awesome—
DOOM.
Some Notes Towards a New Cosmogony
The watchmen gazes down at all the waves & particles of humanity, the twistored framewarp of the city & the sea of sky it sails in. He’s spent his afterlife looking at the minutiae, measuring existence in ticks of certainty, measuring change in clicks of energy & position, dials spinning as he aimed the teleoscope on this scene or that, magnified it, focused in.
Ah well.
•
Some notes towards a new cosmogony, he thinks: time as change, & change as chance, cascades & cadences of potentials; reality, underneath, no more than a casual wave of causality, a flighty certainty flipped in the air. If anything goes in the lawless infinitude of the infinitesimal, existence is as much a possibility as any other.<
br />
Order tossed out by chaos as a glib aside.
•
It’s not what he would call stability but he can see some crazy sort of sense in the curves of change that carve the city below, spirals of streets entangled, lives involved. This strazza here, this plazza there, the unbound city has a strange integrity in the constances of instances. It is a city of souls in torsion, twisted together & twisted in upon their twists, so tight that they seem balls of time & space & mass, events—a coming of age, a birth, a death, wars, wanderings & wedding feasts, avengings & seductions. But beneath it all these are not forms but threads, jangling tangled threads of life & death, things as they are: the twang of a bass note on a blue guitar, a thumbheel thumped on the hollow wood… doom doom.
He takes another slug from his hipflask.
Somewhere below, he could swear, someone is singing.
•