What Entropy Means to Me

by George Alec Effinger

  "That's horrible," said Dore. "It's absurd to think it could work more than once."

  "Oh, I don't know," said the man. "We're but simple country folk. God be with you, goat."

  "Stop," said Dore pleadingly, "you have to help me."

  "Nay. You cannot aid us, and we have nothing for you. Our task is finished." And the man went along across the meadow after his companions, and Dore was once more left alone. Later, as the twilight deepened, our brother thought he saw another goat, standing motionless on the horizon. His own goat showed no sign of recognition, and so Dore kept his peace.

  Today is a special day. The River rose during the night, grumbling and straining its back higher and higher until this morning we saw it from the fields. The sunlight reflected from the boiling surface and shone, sparklike, through the flat gray leaves of the low dey trees along the bank. Peytheida touched me on the arm during breakfast. "Do you think you can leave your history this morning?" she asked. "Long enough to come with us, I mean. You haven't done the book thing in quite a while."

  I nodded. I wasn't aware that I have been that lax in my observances. Things pile up. I'm losing points with Tere, Ateichál, Dyweyne, Joilliena, and the family, not to mention Our Father and Mother, and even the River. How difficult it is to be a functioning artist in a demanding society. Such never-to-be-forgotten masters as Wagner and Kafka could afford to thumb their noses at convention and the myth of sociability. But we lesser luminaries must make efforts to conform, at least until our output has purchased for us a modicum of accepted eccentricity.

  Peytheida carried a worn blue edition of Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington. Elliavia brought a copy of Branch Cabell's Ladies and Gentlemen, complete with dust jacket. I found a volume of Bury's History of Greece. My sisters were very beautiful. I was haggard, bleary-eyed from working late and rising early. My clothing was rumpled; I tend to neglect my appearance when I am composing. The younger children giggle at me behind their hands in the hallways. The older brothers and sisters glance at me at meals and turn away to speak in whispers, with creased brows and much nodding. But this morning I made a discovery of myself. I tried to reach my new and changing personality; but it is still, for the most part, secret. A few hints, and some new peace.

  The River changed from flat gray to flat green, dark flat blue to a black almost as deep as the moonless night. We stood for a few minutes on the bank, silently, within our individual and unjoined thoughts. Then Peytheida tossed her book into the water. The River changed immediately, keeping its same ominous hues but falling back to its accustomed depth, leaving us higher and farther from the current. Elliavia had to throw her book quite a distance then, over an expanse of mud and shore that was already drying and verdant with new, River-sired sedge. Immediately the Cabell touched the water the River lightened in color. I did not wait, but threw my book into the flood. There were no visible effects, but we all felt them in our souls. The whole world enjoyed the repose of the heart.

  I thanked my sisters for asking me to join them. Where before I felt the torture of inconstant emotions, I feel now the joy of unified energies. I am able to verbalize my feeling better—and am now for the first time aware of a sudden love for Dyweyne, and a gratitude for the cherished love of Joilliena. I understand responsibility, chiefly my lapses concerning the proper respect due my house and our River. Tere and Ateichál are justified in their displeasure. I hope that my observances today in some small part rectify my ill-considered neglect.

  I receive a note from Tere. He and his sister-in-faith would be pleased if I were to make amends. Terms to be arranged. Peace. Harmony. Good fellowship.

  I. I cannot write, not about Dore. I will sleep.

  I awoke to find Joilliena kneeling by the side of my bed, praying. I raised my head a little, but she did not notice, so I let it fall back to the pillow. I closed my eyes and pretended to be still asleep. The silence was awful, because the situation was so strange. Perhaps I had been asleep for days or weeks, unconscious and on death's waiting list, and only now had made a miraculous recovery. My tongue felt all right and the inside of my mouth was free of unusual symptoms. My limbs could be moved without discomfort. I did not feel the presence of swellings under my arms or ears. My head and throat were without pain, and I was neither fevered nor chilled. Physically I felt fine.

  But mentally, no. Where was the well-being that soothed me to sleep? I could almost recall that sense of oneness of purpose, of solidarity with my family and my world that destroyed the doubts of the last few weeks. It may be that I have sunk to deeper depression now, having known and misplaced a rare religious event. When at last I sat up and interrupted Joilliena's worship, she merely smiled shyly, stood, and left without a word. I read over my words of last evening and experienced only a sense of profound loss, that the moment of pure devotion had to be so fragile and short-lived. Later I found beneath my bed a scrap of parchment with a crudely drawn duck and the words "O River, forgive him, he doesn't know what he's talking about" inscribed on the back.

  "There is only work. Do it." I will lose myself again and forever in my history. All else is fantasy. People are dreams and hopes are less.

  The goat; Dore. The countryside flattened as they wandered farther from the safety of the River. From Dore's upside-down vantage the features of the landscape seemed to shrink: Tall losperns gave way to stubby, barren fruit trees, then to shag-barked pollits, to thorny bushes, low shrubs, clumpy weeds. The tall grass disappeared and was replaced by the prickly short stuff that we find in hard, stony soil. Dore was desperately thirsty, but never did he find help in being loosed from his creature prison. He traveled bound to the beast for several days. At last he spied a solitary micha tree in the midst of the plain. The goat, also, was intrigued by the anomaly, and as Dore came closer to the tree he discovered that a man was tied to it, as helpless as our brother.

  The tree grew straight and branchless for ten or twelve feet, and there the trunk was marked by two limbs growing out parallel to the ground, looking like two supplicating arms. The poor man had his own arms thrown back over the branches and bound, and his body was thrust forward painfully by the curvature of the trunk. His head hung forward as though he were asleep, comatose, or dead.

  "Hello," called Dore. The convict jerked his head up in surprise.

  "Hello," he said. "Get me down."

  "You can see how I am as resourceless as you, roped as I am to this goat. Do you know how I might be released?"

  "If you don't get me down, I don't care," said the man.

  You can begin to see what the journey and the difficulties have done to Dore. Even Tere and Ateichál in their sanctified rigidity must admit that the things he has seen and the people he has had to deal with must have caused him to change. Surely one can't behave the same, rely on old standard patterns of response in every situation. So of course, Dyweyne, of course it isn't the same Dore we knew. It isn't the same world, either.

  But such things as common courtesy go beyond local custom. Situation ethics do not excuse insolence, vulgarity, and discourtesy. How often Our Mother used to say that very thing! Early in the morning, on the way to the chata fields, I used to hear her mumbling away about politeness. She didn't mind bad news, she always claimed, as long as the messenger was polite. We read often in the Greeks, particularly Oedipus the King and one of the Oresteia, I believe, of the frightened bearer of bad tidings worrying about his own punishment. Politeness is the key. If we remember the three magic words we can open any door. Soon Lalichë will tell me that she thought Promise was the key. That was last chapter.

  So Dore had to explain patiently and carefully to the man in custody of the micha tree. He did so to no avail. The man grew angrier, cursing Dore for lacking the compassion to set him free. Evidently the man was of a weak mind in the past, for he seemingly could not comprehend that Dore, too, was as imprisoned as he.

  "Are you some sort of mythological hybrid?" asked the man in the tree.

  "No," said Do
re.

  "I mean like a centaur or something. You look like part man, part goat. If you have strange and inhuman faculties, you could easily get me down."

  "I'm sorry," said Dore, "but I'm just a man like you, tied to a goat. Like I said, I can't use my hands to free either of us."

  "I can pay you."

  "It's not that."

  "Look," said the man in a surly voice, "why don't we do this: I'll ask you a riddle. If you guess it, you may pass by unharmed. If not, you have to cut me down. Ready? What is it that dreams at noon and toils at midnight, yet never sleeps or works?"

  "It doesn't concern me now," said Dore.

  The man was quiet for a few seconds. "It doesn't matter. You aren't real, anyway."

  "What is reality?" asked Dore.

  "Is that your riddle?" said the man sarcastically. "Did you make that up by yourself?"

  "Well, what is reality?"

  "All right," said the man, "I'll tell you." And the man told Dore what reality really is. "Reality is neatly summed up in this poem:

  What is there but to run, and

  having run, rave, and

  having raved,

  ruin?

  What more?"

  "Where did you learn that?" asked Dore without interest.

  "I always knew it. I'm the corporal manifestation of the spirit of the River."

  Now this, we the readers know, is a patent lie. The corporal manifestation of the River is Glorian. But Dore hasn't thought of that yet. Nevertheless, he didn't accept the stranger's word on the matter.

  Dore, as a paid-up member of our happy clan, had much experience with manifestations and aspects. They are quite a source of amusement among the younger children. Of course, having divine parents leaves one with the constant uncertainty that the doglike animal or friendly shade tree one is observing may well be Father or Mother off on a spree. We frequently tell the toddlers to be good, or Our Father will get them, usually in the form of a streptococcus or a letmoth. If they are frightened and ask to have the night light left on, we turn the screw and tell them that even the light may be an offended Parent, just waiting for the youngster to fall asleep. . . . That always gets them.

  Our Father was compelled to come to Our Mother in various guises, for well-known reasons. The shower of gold was a favorite for a while, until the thrill began to fade. Our Father employed on special occasions the form of the fructifying rainstorm, a very Chaucerian touch that I've always applauded. It took Our whining Mother a while to figure out what to do with a rainstorm. And, too, certain errors and miscalculations were bound to result. We like to repeat the jocular tale of the day Our Father came in from his work with the chairs to find Our Mother in bed with a strange swan.

  "Isn't this —?" said Our Mother, confusion claiming her expression.

  "No," said Our Father, kicking the fowl out of his marriage bed and going out to find a bite to eat. These incidents happened fairly frequently, and Our Mother always had the perfect excuse that she could never be sure that it wasn't her husband, who thus was cuckolded by animals, vegetables, and inanimate objects. But nowadays we wonder.

  I hear shouts of outrage from downstairs, from outside, from next door and up in the towers: "No, we don't wonder. You wonder."

  Not a note, but Tere himself stands at my barrierless door. He is angry, and even his perpetual, oiled smile cannot hide his outrage. I invite him in, offer him a chair, a handful of gebbins. He does not move. He glares, and after a suitable time, smiling, he speaks.

  "We are having a meeting, brother Seyt," he says. "A representative group of us have gathered to discuss your work so far. It would be well for you to attend. The discussion will be salient, instructive, and mandatory. In ten minutes. In my suite."

  His suite. That tells you something, doesn't it? Let me finish with Dore.

  The man chained in the micha tree cursed our brother soundly, promising to bring down all sorts of plagues for Dore's failure to observe the laws of hospitality. Dore couldn't waste any more time with him, so he apologized for his haste and took his departure. After some struggling and painful jabs of numbed feet and hands, the goat moved on. Dore thought he saw another goat, just like his, walking slowly across the plain, a man tied beneath it just like our brother. This time Dore called out, but there was no answer. Perhaps he was hallucinating.

  Tere's rooms were filled with my brothers and sisters. In the large central chamber was a lovely michawood table, which I remembered used to be in the state dining room in the South Wing. Around it were seated Tere, Ateichál, Sabt, Shesarine, Joilliena, Vaelluin, Blin, Dyweyne, Elliavia, Peytheida, Loml, and several others whom I haven't spoken to in many months. Chairs and stools were scattered about and filled the room with staring, uncompromising faces: my brothers and sisters, my family, my critics, my jury. Tere's other four rooms were also crowded and, while these kinspeople could not see me, word of my appearance was passed by messenger from group to group. Nesp, ninth-oldest male (and thus the functioning male member of our family next oldest to me), stood and faced me as I hesitated on the threshold.

  "Ah, Seyt," he said without enthusiasm, "won't you come in?" I glanced at Tere. He said nothing, but smiled dreadfully. I wanted to tell Nesp that I didn't think I would come in, just to see the reaction.

  "Thank you," I said. A seat had apparently been left for me at the table, between Dyweyne and Joilliena, and I sat uncomfortably.

  "We wanted to discuss with you your journal of Dore's pilgrimage," said Nesp. It took me a few moments to remember where I had met him before, but after listening to him for a while I recalled that he was Vice-president in Charge of Permeation for the Ploutos Corporation. I never liked him.

  "Certainly," I said.

  "Now, of course, you have been handed a difficult assignment. And, right off the bat here, at the outset, we'd like to say that we appreciate the diligent way you've handled the hot potato we passed to you. As far as quantity goes, you're doing fine." Nesp paused, and I looked around. No one had changed expression, but Sabt nodded thoughtfully. "But you have a problem," said Nesp. "We realize how formidable a task it must be to chronicle the progress of a near-god —"

  "A god," said Ateichál in her lowest voice.

  "Yes, quite," said Nesp, looking a bit shaken. Could that slip have been enough of a sin to warrant turning in his name and several pounds of flesh, for four digits and a place in the sun? We don't know. That's what I'm supposed to be doing, if they'd only let me alone. I'm codifying the faith.

  "In any event," said Nesp nervously, "we have Our Father and Mother above, with light, rain, and grace. Dore for a time, as we all know, dwelt among us without any outward sign of his special calling. But it is apparent, through the troubled days we have had since his departure, that it was through him that the spirit of Our Parents made itself manifest in our midst. Perhaps we have the divine motivation to unite with God, Our Parents, the River; but without Dore that hope is meaningless."

  "Nicely put, brother Nesp," said Ateichál with an edge of impatience to her voice. "But I think what Seyt would like to hear is criticism more to the point. Style. Technique. Point of view."

  "Yes," said Nesp, nearly sliding beneath the table in his fear, "yes, quite so. If we may direct our attention to those matters now, then. We, as your patrons and your audience, feel that if and when you stray from your precise assignment it is our duty to instruct you. We do not intend to interfere with your material as such. Please don't interpret this as an attempt to censor you or to discourage you in any way. But we are concerned with the matter of correct thought. Orthodoxy. A minimal adherence to the facts as we understand them. And here is our . . . complaint." Nesp smiled at me. I chewed my fingernail and nodded. "You tend to misrepresent both Our Parents and Dore. You allude to incidents in the past which are not official doctrine. Further, lately you have begun to invent what may be interpreted as myths impugning the well-known and documented moral character of our beloved pantheon."

  There was a te
rrible silence. I was expected to defend myself.

  "Thank you," I said. "I appreciate your interest. All I can say is that, of course, the work is yet incomplete, and perhaps you are developing an incorrect impression seeing it bit by bit. I think that it may be best for you to wait until I have finished, when you can see the grand play of narrative, action, suspense, humor, and other tricks. I have spent a great amount of time inventing an overlaying system of color, size, animal, plant, and number symbolism, of which you seem to be unaware, unfortunately. I am using inspirations at such a prodigious rate that my subconscious seems to have formed a protective callus. If I have wandered from my appointed path, forgive me and allow me to try to find it anew."

  They all seemed very satisfied. Nesp rose and came over to me while the younger brothers and sisters were serving cider and donuts. He shook my hand and told me that he had enjoyed my giant. I thanked him. He told me to come down and visit him at the Corporation. I thanked him, looking over his shoulder at Tere and Ateichál, those rival pietists. Neither had moved from his seat, neither had spoken. They both were staring back at me, but I couldn't read the meaning of their looks.

  I am severely chastised. Could this have happened if Dore had been here? An unfair question, a moot point. This started out to be so much fun. It seems sometimes that objects are designed to defeat their apparent purpose. Pens are made to enable one to write words that mask one's meaning. Frustration is the chief weapon of chaos. We don't have forever, and that saddens me.

  A definitely anti-Ateichálian sentiment. All right, fellows. Starting tomorrow I will be better.

  Chapter Eight

  Free at Last

  It's very quiet today.

  There are no unsettling comings and goings of younger family members, asking me if they can be in my book. None of the older brothers and sisters have come in to stand, coughing, by the side of my desk until I acknowledge them. Everyone is leaving me alone today, alone to write my own impeachment, if I will. I feel as if I am auditioning for old age. With what morbid interest are they gathered, to watch me hastening to the thumbscrew and bastinado of Ateichál's sacred mission? Who cheers me on? Is there a section of the grandstand set aside for my fans?