by Ian Watson
“How strange,” meditated Kato, “that American science should commit this act of nihilism. That those who landed on the Moon should now look as far as the eye can see, and say ‘There is Nothing’. We Japanese have always felt very close to nothingness. Our economy is the great contradiction of this inner sense. We can hardly understand the paradox ourselves. Now it all comes to an end. Do you know what we are really doing in this Institute? Conducting an autopsy. Fish, whales… We shall soon be starving in these islands. And we are not even permitted to catch sperm whales any more. But there is no intelligent whale, I tell you… I do not believe it! Yet we have to starve because you Americans believe it.” He stared hard at Chloe Patton, as though her excess fat was blubber filched from Japanese whales, and Japanese mouths; then blinked down at his own body through the bottom half of his bifocals. “Every atom of this body… nonbeing… soon.”
Pathetically, the Director gazed over the tank at Chloe Patton’s plumpness again; this time, as though to reassure himself of her solidity, forgiving her for the sake of that. Chloe continued to evade his gaze.
“Say, how about us stealing one of Hammond’s aces off him? We could commandeer this bright boy of his, hmm?” Orville Parr’s voice was a pasty squeak: a lump of putty, dragged along wet glass.
But they agreed with him.
• • •
Enozawa walked into Parr’s office two days later, while Parr was watching the taxis flying through the haze in their usual panic storm. They’d be the last to go. When they stopped, Tokyo died… They should drive off the expressway parapets to a thousand fire deaths, instead! And Enozawa in one of them.
“Dr Kato committed suicide last night,” the Japanese stated primly, as Parr swivelled round. “We believe there is an onus, an obligation on yourselves and on America for this event. Dr Kato was one of those whose research might have helped feed us. Consequently, in the matter of Nilin—”
“Don’t worry, that’ll all be tied up in a couple days more,” Parr soothed. “I promise you. We’re flying out this whale-click specialist from Mexico… Say, I’m sorry about Dr Kato, I mean sincerely sorry. It’s shocking news. I’m… taken aback. I can’t register it yet—it’s awful.” He hesitated, but curiosity overcame discretion. “How did he…? Is it rude to ask?”
“Dr Kato destroyed his models with a fire axe and then smashed the preserving tanks. He cut his wrists with the broken glass. He died of shock and bleeding in hospital.”
It had hurt, it had taken courage, thought Enozawa. Yet it hadn’t been calm. Director Kato had failed to prepare his spirit. He went on an old man’s rampage, almost an act of petulance.
But Parr was remembering Gerry squirting the old fellow with water, Tom Winterburn discrediting his brain models—and that Chloe Patton playing hard to get. The Japanese naturally regarded them as responsible… And while he remembered, and wished he was somewhere else, his eyes flickered helplessly back to the morning papers.
MEX RIOT THREAT TO BIG DISH: 130 SAID DEAD
blared the Pacific Stars and Stripes.
SUICIDE PLAGUE HITS U.S.: RAPES, HOMICIDES SOAR
blazoned the English-language Mainichi Daily News.
Nineteen
His flipper aches from the chomp of the bull’s jaws, but it isn’t seriously damaged. He swims obediently now, while the bull dawdles far behind him, sending out only occasional pulses to track him.
An expectant silence stills the ocean, which the bull seems chary of disturbing.
The Big Wailing Ones—those gossips of the sea—have been hushed by the leaping, dancing Click-Whistlers, those who can send two modes of signal together: and because they can send two modes, those were the first (as sheer game, to start with) to leap the gap between clicks of his Own Kind, and whistles of the Singers. Songs so vast that they can cross whole seas…
As he swims, he thinks of what the bull has pulsed to him…
Tens of centuries to attune the Wailing Ones! His Own Kind can pulse out songs direct to them now. But the leaping little Click-Whistlers still do it faster. Such vivid, playful, speedy Ones! They toy with ideas as with floating wood or weedmass—butting and nodding notions about brightly in the kaleidoscopes of their minds. Alas, they cannot fix ideas in glyphs. Their kaleidoscopes keep turning, losing the bright patterns of their thoughts in play.
However long they whistle the signatures of the great glyphs, they can only turn them through an axis or two, in whistletalk. New glyphs are beyond them, till his Own Kind state them.
If they weren’t so happy, this might be their tragedy. They sense so much more than the Dumb Wailing Ones, of the inner order of a glyph. Guess at that deep moment of the Star, when a glyph becomes a map of thought, image of the world: when his Own Kind swim mind in mind, dreaming down the sea years though simpler and simpler glyphs of understanding as the aeons drop away, back to the simplest, First glyph of all in the melting midst of an Ice Age…
By comparison his Own Kind’s evolution to awareness is a tangible planned thing, mapped in the glyph stages in their brows. They can almost direct that evolution now, by choice of glyph refinements—moulding the melon through choice of sounds, in star-glyph after star-glyph, towards megaglyphs of awareness still far away down the swimming ages, still unattainable, yet guessed at as The Goal.
A process slow as the growing of a coral atoll—to enclose a pool of water, reflecting exact images clarified out of the wave tumble of Time, and Being.
The Stars will build this mirror, cell by cell, in soft honeycomb brows.
While the Click-Whistlers wonder at this enterprise, and caper round it, playing games. Sad that they can’t enter a Star, with their tiny bodies and brows—when they are the ones who linked the glyphs to the songs of the Crying Ones, so that new glyphs can be known throughout the seas. Yet not so sad for them, as they gambol and copulate and whistle, leaping and dancing on their tails…
• • •
He pulses a chary click; hears Three, and then another Three, converging on the same point of ocean. Six points of the Star. He is Seven.
He meets them nose to nose: old male, old female, younger female in one Threesome; three strong bulls in the other.
Slack, calm day—easy to stay in position, waving flukes. Almost as easy as holding (hands)!
His left eye glimpses flank and eye of the oldest bull; his right eye squints at the old female. Of the others, he sees nothing at all—only feels the butt of their brows, as they rock in and out.
“We repeat a simple Glyph,” the oldest bull burst-pulses, “CONGRUENCE. Tune our seven clicks to CONGRUENCE. CONGRUENCE opens the mouth to the Greater Glyphs—”
• • •
In the mobile wax, a ghostly, dissolving diagram conjures out of sound. The wax, at sea level, being still in its most fluid, oily state. Pulsing a repeat of it, he reads the same image printed briefly on six other melons…
Ranged in the Star, there’s only inwards to be heard from, only the oily sculptures conjured by their voices to hear. No more world of sea and sweetmeats. Bodies block off all outside sounds, in seven directions. Seven melons are the sole field of attention.
Pulsing, the ghost gathers strength; and interlocks in a sevenfold chain of wax—an annular polygon…
Thoughts cluster round the glyph… Thoughts articulated, in waxen crystals.
Congruence is a (key), he reasons. What’s a (key)?
A (hand) turns a (key). The (key) almost always locks; rarely opens… The (hand) then, is congruent with a lock. Five bars curl round in a cage, to make a (hand). One short bar. And four long bars. Bending. Locking.
This cage fits on to things. It acts on things. Things obey it. Thus things are made—such as (steels).
But the (hand)-cage is flexible too, caressing hair, the lips, the penis. It even opens up flat and seems not to be a cage at times. Yet it is only the model of a cage, unfolded. Thus it makes fools of us. (But who is W?) For it seems so open and free, so extensive, always reaching out. We pity tho
se who lack these flat, soft cages. The Cageless Ones, we think of them as. They have no grasp of situations. No grip on the world.
(But who is “WE”!! Who is “WE”!!)
This (hand) has formed the mind, the thoughts, the (words). Minds, thoughts and (words) have all followed the contours of (hand), unwittingly. How could I be aware of this, when awareness is of the same shape as what it should be aware of? One fits the other perfectly, so that one never notices this… Awareness takes (hand’s) fives and tens for numbers. Accepts its grip on things for relations in the world. (Hand) closes round awareness in a cage—and so subtly is it done that cage and awareness appear identical, and call themselves Consciousness…
“What are those (Hands), (Words)?”
The question is his own.
It’s theirs, too.
For they are congruent, the Seven. The Glyph prints itself in their brow oil, fades, reprints itself… In the congruent intervals, questions take form…
“(Hands)? (Words)?” Probing. Insisting. Constructing an image of him, around the Glyph. Filling in gaps in his own self-image, till his mind floats physically, mapped in oil… The resonating Glyph teases it out and frames it. The liquid mirror hints…
“There is Another One, in him—”
“The faintness of another being—”
“What are these (hands), (words), (steels)?”
“The Glyph can be tuned. Dilated. More is implied—”
“Star can tune this other being—”
“Are you reluctant?”
“To know who I am?” he replies. “How can I be?”
Soon, a sharpening of the self-image…
“You are an (instrument), a (tool)—”
“The relation between your two Selves was carved by (Steel)—”
“Yet there was love in your making, too. Do you know this love?”
“Love… yes. There was snow, there were (trees)! Yet I saw nothing through my eyes. I had to be led by the (hand)… She led me. She she she. Thin, tiny. How could she lead my bulk?”
“The other being in you—”
“We can tune this Being more—”
“A point here, a point there: separated sparks of the Reality—”
“Dots of a glyph of Being—”
“We link them in a net. A web emerges. The self that hides—”
“Let us repeat a higher Glyph, representor—”
• • •
Sound booms through their brows then. A new sound is echoed, re-echoed. Magnified resonances print the oil till a new Glyph of complex wax transects them—their oil stiffening as though they’re deep under tons of sea, diving to the deep floor…
While the wax remains hard, a sound ghost vibrates into being again. Bits of a lattice built for another reason regain their old, lost order. A ghost surfaces through his invented being and floats in the wax annulus, within the Seven.
Awareness of himself hangs brief as a jellyfish dissolving on the shore; melts as the wax melts back to oil.
The Seven suck air, blow foam across each other’s backs… and regard the image of him in their memories.
He’s exhausted by the strain of sustaining that density of wax, which should weigh him down on a dive. But amazed.
“We must form the Star again, together. You are only a pup; need resting and feeding, strength to sustain the Star. We held the Glyph up for you in your brow, then. Condition of dependency.”
“You are used to making sounds with (Steels). With (Steel Instruments). Strange. Let us rethink the map of you that was spun round representor—”
“You will learn to carry this Glyph,” clicks the old female, more kindly. “Even the Great Glyphs, resonator, conceiver, transcender… But you must go now. For a while. Till we think how to cure you. Hear this—
“Once, World was a single point of sound, in a womb woven of silence. Time passed, and the first sound, in a womb woven echoed, till it became many sounds. World was woven from waves of sound crossing, vibrating, for a million ages. Till sounds stiffened into the hard wax of the world, with all its shapes of Being, and the soft wax of the sea. All is born of sound. Yet not by this thing (Word), be sure! (Word) and (Hand) are destroyers of sound. Disruptors. They rupture the womb of silence itself… We must pulse a song for the Wailing Ones to warn Our Kind. Nothing may warp the searoad of the Glyphs… Oh so slowly we have followed it, ever since the mid-Time of Ice!”
Twenty
“He’s taken part in the Thought Complex!” Katya cried exultantly, bursting in on Kapelka, waving the latest printout.
“Katerina Afanasyevna!” the Professor chided her, using the formal mode of address for the first time in many months. He indicated the other occupant of the room: a bulky man draped in a thick black fur coat, who was overflowing the cane seat both physically and in the matter of dress. The seat wove white fingers into the mass of him, cupped hands attempting to stem a waterfall.
“This is Katerina Afanasyevna Tarsky, who acts as Jonah’s prime control,” Professor Kapelka introduced. “Katya, this is Comrade Orlov, from the Supervisory Committee. He’s come about the regrettable disappearance of the Nilin child.”
Orlov’s vinegary eyes regarded her speculatively. Not so much pretty, as “interesting”, he decided. Effervescently soulful, for a certainty. Melancholy, beneath her surface euphoria. Her full lips had a chapped, fissured texture to them; yet she was wearing a coquettish trace of waxy lipstick, which she was constantly licking at with nervous fluttering forays of her tongue. He’d have classed her figure as slim, rather than outright skinny, but for those large dark eyes of hers: they gave her such a waif-like appearance. The sort of girl, in short, whom he rather liked to smother in his coat, and body. In need of a mature man. Orlov winked at her.
“That was careless of you,” he remarked to Kapelka, “but maybe not so unfortunate, as it turns out. There’s such panic in American life at the best of times. You know about Hammond, of course?”
“The radio astronomer?” Kapelka inclined his head cautiously. In fact, he knew all about the Hammond business from blanket coverage over the American Far East Network transmitters in northern Japan. Still, it could be impolitic to know from such a source. He ransacked his memory for the exact official version. How much had Pravda reported? The atheistical universe was perfectly acceptable; but a non-materialist cosmos which pre-supposed a God, even if an absent one! That had to be dismissed as a mystification. Reported dismissively.
Still, the very fact of reporting it so promptly suggested it was having impact. Needed combating.
The American radio had announced, in a breathless dramatic way, a crazy pilgrimage to Hammond’s observatory in Mexico, that ended in bloodshed and violence. (Pravda concurred.)
Then, there was trouble in some Islamic countries: demands for a jihad against the atheistical greedy white races who only wanted to destroy faith in order to undermine the revolutionary fervour of the Third World. (Pravda deleted the middle term in this.)
Then there’d been many people crushed and trampled in St Peter’s Square in Rome when the Pope had appeared on the balcony to read an Encyclical… (Pravda reported this with sarcastic relish; perhaps, in so doing, vindicating obliquely the American claim that there were disturbances in Eastern Europe too, among the Catholic Poles.)
The world took Hammond seriously. He’d been right before, when he discovered the hidden galaxy colliding with the Milky Way. There’d been a flurry of popular hysteria then, for a few days, till Paul Hammond explained how “catastrophe” was a technical, mathematical term; how his new-found galaxy was seventy thousand or so light years removed from us and much smaller than our own galaxy—and that while it might eventually distort the shape of the Milky Way, pulling free a bridge of glowing gas between the two, that event lay so far in the future that the human race would undoubtedly be extinct by then… and in any case stars were so far apart that one galaxy’s fringes could almost pass through another’s fringes with impunity.
Well, Hammond had gained celebrity status, then. A deliberately engineered performance, perhaps! Nevertheless the man was swept to prominence as a pundit and remained one in the popular mind.
To be sure, the American radio reported even a baseball match as though it was a war! (And reported their wars as though they were games…) Yet this new discovery, and the reactions to it, certainly sounded disturbing, even filtered through Pravda.
“Yes, I know about it,” said Kapelka.
Orlov thumped a short, square index finger on the desk. Missing its top joint, his finger ended in a stiff rubbery knob.
“Oh the appeals to the Academy of Science from Washington! From the White House, no less. Even though Hammond supported that man’s election. But our Embassy tells us there is a clique against their President now who can use panic and disorder to strengthen their own position. It is those who have been helping Hammond, latterly. Wheels within wheels, eh, Professor?”
“But I don’t know anything about these intrigues,” said Kapelka miserably, feeling increasingly—if instinctively—convinced that the Nilin boy’s disappearance had been no random accident, but was part of some intrigue too. And he had boasted to Katya about how much freedom they enjoyed in their work! When the truth was that the puppet strings were simply being kept hidden. Now they were about to be illuminated. Why else was Orlov mentioning Hammond, but to point a parallel?
“Our own Caspian and Mongolian radio telescopes are to link up, to check Hammond’s observations.” Orlov rubbed his hands. “This is going to be one case where Soviet science is seen publicly to bail the Americans out.”
“What if Hammond’s right, though?” Kapelka asked dubiously. “Are you assuming he’s wrong? Or are you planning to…” He hesitated.
“Falsify?” laughed Orlov. “But of course not. Suppose he is right, Professor—that’s ideal! The facts may be as he says—but interpretations can certainly vary. Can’t you see what a coup it will be, if America is forced to adopt the same ideological position as the Soviet Union? A positive, dialectical-materialist view of the data, instead of their present mystical-pessimistic one! In point of fact, Hammond’s vision of the universe can be treated perfectly adequately in Marxist terms, as a demonstration of that prime concept in dialectics, the ‘negation of the negation’… Thus the Universe, and Man’s role in it, are recuperated by us! And Soviet ideology is shown as what it has been all along—optimistic and humanistic—as opposed to the empty soullessness of Capitalism.”
