A disturbing thought has come into my mind. It was put there by Snake. Many of my disturbing thoughts are intruded into my mind by Snake. Snake, I believe, is a mobile extension (though he is lazy and sessile most of the time) of some demon. We built a little box for him to live in on our leadership foray, but what came to live in the box, in that amoral coil, was something other. The thought is that humans, being of time, may be of short time only. They are contingent, they are here on a permit that may be withdrawn at any time. And there are signs that it may be withdrawn in the present large moment. The signs (at first I closed my ears and refused to listen to the signs) seem to be authentic. They are prodigious, they are convincing, they are all but inevitable. This terrifies me as I have developed a great affection for human persons. The signs (I close my ears to them, I close my eyes and nose, but they come in overpoweringly by other sensors and intuitors) are multiplied again and again. Mankind’s number is up and it seems that it will be called suddenly. The chances of evading this ending are very slim and are based on premises which I do not understand at all.
Do you know of the old Jewish legend of the thirty-six just men who are the pillars of the world? It is not the billions who support it, it is these thirty-six only. They are enough, though barely. It is for their sake only that the thing is kept going, that the permit is not withdrawn. And whenever one is finally Called to His Reward (a term which I do not understand) another takes his place. Heretofore none has refused to accept the awful station. Lately, however, there have been several refusals. Now the numbers are not sufficient to support the apparatus. It rumbles, it cracks, it begins to come down. This is really a high and fearsome drama that may be entering its terminal scene —one that cracks the very sky.
Snake is a creature who trails “balloons” much as human children do. He may have been doing it all the time. I never thought to test him for it before. Snake has been many other creatures, and perhaps some non-creatures. I can hardly believe it of him. “Multiplex of wing and eye, whose strong obedience broke the sky,” as a poet of the age just before our own has it: but the words and the “balloon” in which they appear are many millennia older than that poet. And in still another of these faint enclosures is the heroic line, “What purpled prince in fine-limbed majesty!” And there is Snake himself: heroically limbed and luminous. Even now, I believe, he takes great pride in those grand limbs. And there was another one—
—but there is a distraction. Aloysius Shiplap is singing harshly while he is doing trailbreaking (“Boy, does that Aloysius ever leave a broken trail!” Valery says) work on mad molecules in a little lab that is plugged into one of my functions:
Then nail my head on yonder tower,
Give every town a limb—
I wouldn’t be sorry if that did happen to Aloysius. Sometimes I wish that I were a human person and so would not be subject to distractions when I try to assemble my thoughts.
Snake—I was saying—has many of these encapsuled histories of himself going far back “before fish flew or emus strode,” but several of them make me a little queasy, so that I have hardly begun to explore all his remembered forms and concepts. I will review them all, however.
When I question Audifax O’Hanlon deeply I often get real and valuable information. At other times I come right to the living verge with him and then he goes tongue-tied on me. Tonguetied literally: the veins of his throat will stand out blue with his effort to speak and he will break into sweat. Then he will slump into a kind of bemused relaxation. “Ah, the blessed amnesia,” he will say, “I don’t know what I would do without it.” This applies both to things that have been and to things that will be. He knows them all, in a way, but he is not capable of examining or uncovering some of these things, or he is not allowed to do so.
This is frustration to me, of course, but there are other gaps and forgettings that bother me even more. What, for instance, do you make of a rock that goes amnestic on you?
I have been taking précis and combinations of précis of geological formations, or archeological deposits, of swamps and moraines and mud and lime banks in the process of becoming geological formations, or petrifications and fossilizations, of imprints and vestiges. More, I have been taking précis of species, of tribes, of septs, of towns and the roots of towns, of families obliterated, and of minds still resounding after many generations. I take précis of climates and remembered climates, of persons with no least bone remaining (précis still cling in unlikely places like ancient odors), of cultures and of things more personal than cultures. And cutting across all these I find strata of collateral amnesia. Once, twice, three times I find it.
Pardon, there is another interruption. It is nothing but a flight of eagles, but I must go and talk to them, as the human members are unable to. The eagles ask me about the Leader. They mean Gaetan Balbo. I have to tell them that Gaetan is no longer here; and that he is not, in fact, the Leader. The eagles leave puzzled. They are wing-weary and confused.
I collect my thoughts again. I am talking about a break in memory in all five orders and in inanimate nature. I am talking about a several-times break that shakes me. There is one special amnestic gash across the whole spectrum; it does not lie very far in the past when we are telling time by the big rock-clock. Every group-précis which I can track down, of region or tribe or kind, of profession or climate or countryside, or marl or lime or clay, of stream or swamp or cliff, of mammal or lungfish or reptile, everyone shows the coordinated gap or gash in the same place. There is a stroke of searing white light through every strata of mind or mound, so illuminating that it blinds, so memorable that it drowns memory.
And after the blinding gash—it is not an awakening, for all of these things seem to have been awake all the time. It was a bolt from the blue, and the green and brown and sea-white, that numbed all memory immediately anterior to itself. The ice had forgotten whether it was advancing or receding. The hills forgot what they had just been about; the rivers forgot, the grass forgot, the beasts forgot and the people forgot. The very clay and the loam forgot what they had been doing only a moment before: and they have not fully remembered it yet.
I have a clinging précis of a man and a woman. They aren’t particularly handsome or talented. But they are rather original in their make-up and execution: they have the rather interesting touch which many persons try for in themselves and miss. Where I pick up their précis after the gap, the two were standing in the world on the edge of a plateau and looking down a slope to plains. An incredible adventure had just ended for them, and they did not remember what it was: the residue they had from it was a sinking sense of loss and an embattled determination. They stood clothed and in their right minds: they had intelligence and tongue and culture. They went down the slope to the plains and set their hands to the affairs of the world.
The gear and furniture of the world, as though on signal from them, also set to doing. The hills and ice and beasts and clay and loam still did not remember what they had been doing, but now they remembered what they must do.
As an honorable and intelligent machine I will swear that I have discovered this thing to have happened. It is a puzzle and a source of puzzles. The human persons and their context have not only forgotten, but they have forgotten the forgetting. I come as mechanism onto this evidence. I stumble over it. But I hardly see it more than persons see it, and I cannot see beyond it at all. It is quite a different world that is distantly beyond it, though made up of all the same pieces.
There have been several other such partial or total amnesias. Of one very shattering and comparatively quite recent one I can only say that it happened. It is still too close and too numbing for analysis. Something happened that had never happened before; something happened after which the world could not be the same again. But it was partially forgotten in the moment that it happened and it is not realized yet. Its implications still hang crackling in the air these late centuries. We are living in the narrow interval between the lightning and the thunde
r. Perhaps we are already into the moment of wine and do not know it.
These speculations are very difficult for me as machine. If people do not know these things of themselves, how am I to know them? Yet it is my assignment to uncover such things. And another damnable interruption—
—it is Valery. She is raising a ruckus, coming on waves of words which I still cannot discern. The Late and Elegant Cecil Corn is with her, and this has something to do with a nameless project which she is persuading Gregory Smirnov to set up for the Institute.
“—the under-the-ground does not belong to them,” Valery was challenging. “We will fight them for it. We will fight them in the roots and in the hearts of the rocks. We’ll battle them in the deep caves and in the cellars of the forests. We will undercut them in the understudding of the mountains. The world may belong to them by occupation in their own time, but the roots of the world belong to us. They are our roots: they are not theirs.” Valery was wrathy, and Cecil Corn was elegantly amused.
“With whom do you battle for the roots, Valery-raillery?” I asked.
“The down-devils. Why should they have all the caves? Caves are too much fun to leave to down-devils.” Then she was gone again.
“She is the only one I know who is always completely in motion,” the Late Cecil Corn said. “From the viewpoint of a dead man I can say that those completely without motion are a gruesome lot.”
“I know what you mean,” I say. “It is a happy accident, I suppose, that popular and commercial photography among humans has never been instant photography. We do now have almost instant photography for scientific purposes in scientific laboratories; that is a different thing entirely. But popular or common photography has never been instant; it has been of exposure of as much as a thousandth of a second, even more in the early days of the thing. The difference is that pictures of the common sort have been softened pictures of fuzz-edged motion, of life. Really instant pictures are pictures of no motion at all, of death. It is more than a verbalism to say that human persons are dead at every instant of their lives, stark staring dead. They are dead with their dead bones showing through their faces. (Instant photography reminds me very much of X ray.) Whatever is of any instant is dead. Motion and life are not to be trapped by instants, or they instantly cease to be motion and life.”
“You are absolutely right,” said the Late Cecil Corn, or else he didn’t.
“It is hard for an intense-speed realizing-machine like myself to explain these things to human persons, however,” I said.
“I sympathize with you completely,” said the Late Cecil Corn, or else he didn’t.
For a moment let us treat the problem of the Late Cecil Corn. It is not a problem to me and it would not be a problem to other intelligent machines: we do not give the same importance to sequence that humans do. It is not a problem to the Institute members, except to Gregory Smirnov. And it’s not a problem to Audifax or Diogenes: they both like the Late Cecil, but they can take him or leave him alone.
I myself communicate with Cecil’s person-précis, and it seldom matters to me whether I converse with a person-précis or with a present person. The problem of Cecil Corn may be a stumbler, however, to other human readers of these High Journals. I believe that most human persons are like Gregory Smirnov: they like to keep a firm grip on their bearings.
The explanation and present belief of Gregory on this subject is that there is a conspiracy astir, and that the members of the conspiracy are Valery, Aloysius, Cogsworth, and Glasser. They have gang-shagged him with hypnotic assault, Gregory insists, all for a mischievous game. They all knew the sudden and subtle man named Cecil Corn, and they work a group-recall of him. And, taking old Gregory from every side and undermining him at the same time, they cause Gregory to see the Late Cecil, even to talk with him when he sometimes forgets himself for a moment. And, as a matter of fact, this explanation and belief of Gregory is the truth of the affair.
Except that it isn’t the whole truth.
The Late Cecil Corn is illusion, but he is more than illusion. He could not become visible without the machinations of the Institute folks, but he would still be there, all but visible. He lingers in an uncommon way. He doesn’t understand it himself, but he half jokes about it.
“If they will not believe you, perhaps they will believe a man returned from the dead,” he often says, when he contributes his bit to an argument.
“Oh, Cecil, you do not return, you never left,” Valery will say crankily. (Valery had an odd project going now, and Gregory is going to activate it.) Well, why didn’t the Late Cecil Corn ever leave? Other human persons leave when they die.
“In the north Atlantic Ocean, beyond the Faeroes and a little off the routes, there is a wave,” Cecil said once. “It rose once, as many waves do, but it did not fall back. It hangs there as if it were clinging to something. But it is not a silent wave or a motionless wave. It still has its curled roaring and it churning foaming. There is no barrier around it. Fish have been harpooned out of it, and boats have come quite close to it. It is like any other cresting wave except that it doesn’t fall back. So far as I know it is the only wave of its sort in the world.”
“Are you comparing yourself to the wave that hangs against the sky and does not fall back?” Diogenes Pontifex asked.
“No. Only that it is unique. And I seem to be,” said the Late Cecil Corn.
The concept of the Wild-Wine continues to form, or ferment in me. By its nature it can be savored, but it will never be seen completely. The philology of it becomes more confused. Is it Easterwine? Is it East-Wind? The east wind, which is the barm-wind, the yeasting wind, is the exception that makes the difference: for the prevalent winds of the world are from west to east. The west winds are the mass winds, the lump winds. But the tempering wind, when it comes, the fermenting wind, the leavening wind is from the Levant, from the East. But perhaps the Easterling people feel it as a Westerling thing. It is the wind that bloweth where it listeth.
(We will begin the project in the morning. It is an odd project, even for the Institute for Impure Science.)
With what coin will we buy the Wild-Wine? Will it be the Easterling (the sterling) penny? Sterling is the same word as little star. It is the silver stamped with the star standard. Or will the coin be the Rix Dollar of the Easterling district of the Hansa-Baltic? Or will it be the Levant Dollar of old Austria (and of old Ethiopia)? I do not joke entirely. Everything is bought with some coin.
(I have pretty well given them all their assignments on the project. It has to have a boss; the director Gregory, knowing himself too shallow for it, has made me boss of the project.)
“When I was a kid, fiddling with a crystal radio, I got Heaven once,” Diogenes Pontifex said. “No, I’m not joking. Why should I joke? It was absolutely the best thing on the air. I could get it again if I weren’t afraid. It is there. I know how to pick it up any time.”
“When I was an older man, fiddling with a more sophisticated piece of equipment in a laboratory, I once got Purgatory on the radio,” said the Late Cecil Corn. “No, I don’t joke either. It was, I assure you, the most powerful thing I ever pulled out of the air. I know it to have been authentic. In my latter state I have brushed it again several times. But I am not there now. I don’t know where I am. I suspect that I am in the world with you.”
It is tomorrow morning and the project has begun.
The snake-belly reader was climbing up gypsum cliffs. They were crumbly—
CHAPTER ELEVEN
—nor found our true kith or angelical kin,
or ever discovered that shape that we’re in.
The insoluble problem for any narrator is to express the perfect sphere by means of a straight line, or even a shaggy sphere by a crooked line. For any subject or happening is globe-shaped, or at least glob-shaped, of some solidity and substance. And any narration must have sequence, which is line.
But why narrate spheres? Why strive for such an ideal or ideated form? Surely the
re are other shapes more curious, more open, more pregnant, though pregnancy does tend toward the spherical. There are other shapes more varied. Why not narrate saddles or quarries? What kind of saddles, then?
Dromedary saddles, I suppose. They’re the closest thing to the shape of it.
Ermenics of Shape—Audifax O’Hanlon
—The snake-belly reader was climbing up gypsum cliffs. They were crumbly rock cemented together with lime, and glistening in the morning sun. The lime gypsum of the cliffs had a tang as though it were unaccountably alive, or too recently dead. Really it smelled slightly edible. But there was a ranker odor coming from the caves of the cliffs, an odor incredibly but impossibly alive and intolerably ancient. Snakes! The snake-belly reader had a retching fear of snakes. His name was Glasser.
He was a poor climber, he was ragged and had holes in his shoes, he was wretchedly fitted for his job, and he was humorless. But the shape of his fear might have been part of the shape of what we’re seeking. In personality he was the least of the members of the Institute. He couldn’t turn his assignment into a vivacious thing as could Valery, into a giantized thing as could Gregory, into a splendidly outré thing as could Aloysius. Some have the vocation to high paradox and intuition and involvement with the mysterious shape. But always there must be some humble ones who are the hewers of wood, the drawers of water, the readers of snakes’ bellies.
But snakes got Glasser. It was the cold uncleanliness of this cleanest of animals that shivered him. Is the snake’s unnaturalness due to its lacking appendages? Why should the lack make it weird and unnatural? But Glasser in his limited way was a man or trembling courage. He had never in his life refused any fearful task, or went about it any way except in fear.
Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine Page 18
