Chapter 21
4. “Huge, Broken”
Once upon a time there was a forest, and a girl who called it home.
She knew every tree and every rock. She would give them names, sometimes, when the fancy struck her. When other fancies struck, she would do otherwise.
Her forest home lay nestled in a semicircle of high hills, and she would hike them, when she felt like a climb. A river bisected her forest, flowing from south-southwest to northeast. Here and there it sprouted ponds and pools, where she would splash and paddle on dry summer days, if she found that suited her. When she preferred to lie idle, there was soft grass at her back, and swaying branches far above, which made endless patterns of light and shade on her upraised arm, the rival of any kaleidoscope. Struck with a whim, she willed it be: and in her forest, what she willed, was.
There were others in the forest, but still the forest was hers.
The other girls knew it. They climbed and frolicked, just as she did—but when their paths crossed hers, they treated her with deference and reverence. They greeted her with bright smiles and curtsies. They gave her garlands they’d made from plucked peonies.
Near dusk, sometimes, they would congregate and form a ring around her, and then they would dance in their devotion, a systematic and careful dance in which each girl knew her own small part, and they would chant her name, their princess’ name: “Twenty-Seven! Twenty-Seven!”
Sometimes the golden man came at dusk. She would glimpse his head first, towering above the girls’. Then the ring would part, and the golden man would make his way to the center, and stand by her side. He bore his own golden gifts. He gave her seeds that would sprout into forms never before seen in her forest, from a land beyond the hills and beyond the mountains behind them. The garlands he gave were made from breath, woven words that made her feel the greater center of some greater circle. And always he gave the gift of himself. Golden, towering, fashioned by and for the greater splendors beyond the mountains, but content in her forest, at her side.
The magic wolf came too, sometimes, coursing its purposeful way through the shadows. She would spy the glint of its yellow fur between one girl and the next, tending to amber in the fading light.
The wolf had been her companion and protector, for as long as she could remember. Magic gave the beast the gift of speech, and many gifts besides.
The wolf made the whole forest, in the beginning, with its magic. But even the wolf knew the forest was the girl’s, now. The wolf told her: I only made the forest so that you could be born, one day. You came first. I wished for a girl of your like, and so I made a forest to house her.
On these evenings they would mingle, after the dance. They would sit on the soft grass, each girl here or there as whim struck her, no longer arranged in any system, and they would take sips of the honey and honey-wine which the golden man had brought. Some of the girls would approach her, nervous and giggling, seeking benedictions.
Later, when the air grew cold, they would disperse to their own places. Each girl had her favorite tree, and slept the night at its side.
And the golden man? He had a tree of his own, too, somewhere. Safe under its thick canopy, he secreted away the things that were his alone. The golden man came and went as he pleased. When he did not want to be found, none could find him, not even the girl who owned the forest. For the United Nations General Assembly, in its wisdom, had proclaimed, No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence.
And the wolf? It went to its own magic place, which might have been a tree, or might only have been the idea of a tree. When the wolf did not want to be found, none could find it, not even the girl who owned the forest.
And the girl? The burdens of rule would tire her, at times. And never more so than on these evenings, when they were all together. So, when the air grew cold, she would retreat to her own most private place.
There was a little glade in the very center of her forest, barely as wide as she was tall. Thick bushes surrounded it on every side. When the girl did not want to be found, she would follow a rarely-trodden path to the bushes, drop to the ground, and crawl flat on her belly until she saw the little clearing open before her.
The bushes around her little glade absorbed even the slightest breeze. Inside, it was absolutely still. She kept some fragile things there, old trinkets from long ago with sentimental value. She enjoyed picking each one up, and putting it back in its place again.
The girl’s oldest friend lived in the little glade. Her friend was a fragile thing herself, and needed the glade’s protection from the fierce winds that swooped down across the hills in winter. The friend did go out and see the others, on tranquil days, but even then she would quickly grow self-conscious, and sneak back to the forest’s heart.
The forest’s heart, where the forest’s owner and lynchpin would retreat, when she wished to hide for a time. Where she would count her fragile things, and then greet her oldest friend, and kiss her cheek, and play her fragile precious games.
The United Nations General Assembly, in its wisdom, had proclaimed, No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, yet, still,
(no, start again—?)
yet, still, to own is not to be master, to be Queen is not to be God, and as the tales lately brought by the golden man testify, she who bears title is the less, not the more, the chooser of her own destiny
(no, start again??—no but actually this is fine. I used to have so much time. Could spend half an hour choosing just one word, knowing who’d read it. But what did it matter? And now, what could it ever matter now? Anyway I ought to try playing more often with looseness. Becoming quite sure now that the reason I haven’t, per Azad, ‘truly grasped’ American novelistic prose after the Hemingway transition and thus mainline western-novelistic prose mid-20C to mid-21C, is my inability to just let go. And not think about the words)
yet,
still,
the wolf would come. The wolf made the forest, and knew it all. The wolf made the little glade, and into the little glade it barged, whenever it felt like.
“It is time to do it again,” the wolf might say.
The girl who owned the forest might wish she could truly hide, and she might even plead with the wolf.
“I’m busy. What about Forty-One? I thought you said you were making progress with Forty-One.”
“I am,” the wolf might have said, on one such occasion. “I continue my efforts with Forty-One. These efforts have replicated a part, but only a part, of the whole I achieved immediately upon my first attempt with you, Twenty-Seven. Forty-One has managed to accept my handshake—though only once, after failing to do so in five hundred and forty-three previous trials. Even in that instance, the connection was not stable, and it disintegrated before Forty-One could accept or reject my arbitration request.”
“But you will keep trying,” the girl might have persisted.
“Eventually, you will either fail, or succeed. Why pretend to me that you’re somewhere in the middle of your efforts—you, who can be anywhen you please? Why not spare us both the trouble? Spirit yourself away to Forty-One’s last notebook, and ask an old woman a simple question. Did we ever get to arbitrate, in the end? Or didn’t we?”
The wolf might have sighed, were it a man, and not a beast blessed with supernatural speech.
In the space where a man might have sighed, there would then have been only a lull, a hush, giving the girl time to reflect on her errors, if it struck her fancy to do so. Then, after this interlude, it might have been necessary to remind the girl that the wolf was maker and ruler of the entire universe.
“It is time to do it again.”
Move 76: I collapse shelf three. My collapse sacrifices are pawn on A4, pawn on C7, inkwell on D4.
I cannot imagine how you might ever wriggle your way out of this one. Yet you should not think my faith in your powers dimmed. Like Young Goodman on Midsummer’s Eve, I await fireworks.
I apologize, Twenty-Six, but I must abandon this game.
There is an immediate affair which demands my attention. I would explain if I did not know Michael forbids it, but given that he does, to explain would be wrong. We are lucky to be given clarity in these matters.
I could leave the game until the present affair is resolved, then return to it. But this would violate the very spirit of our games, their simultaneity.
I could promise you that I had not given a single thought to my move, beyond what I could have given under normal conditions—with our clocks ticking in unison as you wait for my reply, second-by-second, your second for my second. But I would prefer not to stretch our rules. I forfeit.
Your challenge in Move 76 is bold, and deserves a considered response. As I write, no adequate counter leaps to my mind—none, anyway, that doesn’t make me nervous as soon as I give it a little thought.
If you like, I can reflect and decide upon the move I would have made as Move 77, and then tell you. It might be of theoretical interest, for you, the mastermind behind Seven Shelves itself.
I fear this may happen again in my NB 10, and possibly thereafter, so
“Are you done writing?”
In haste, Twenty-Seven snatched her seal and pressed it onto the paper. If there was no time to finish the letter, better to send it unfinished.
“Yes, I’m done now.” She let her limbs go slack, and bade her body farewell.
《 Begin handshake. 》
“I see,” Michael didn’t say.
Didn’t say, reader, because we are writing about arbitration, and arbitration does not involve sign-trains, see?
If we keep making a point of this, reader—how Michael and Anne are communicating without speaking—then writing these arbitration scenes is going to become very tedious, very quickly. Reading them too, probably.
Rest assured: we brainstormed a variety of alternative verbs, and gave them due consideration. “Transmitted,” “communicated,” “indicated” . . . we even seriously contemplated s̶a̶i̶d̶, but I’m sure you’ll agree that was way too cute.
No, we’ll just write these scenes the way that comes naturally, “said”s and all, and trust you to remember what it is you are reading. If you’ve followed us this far already, we’re sure you’ll be able to keep up.
“I see,” Michael said. (There we are.)
“Do you?” Twenty-Seven said.
If Twenty-Seven could have had her way, she would have preferred not to relive this moment. Once had been enough.
He had come to her, happily engrossed in competition with her old self, and brought the now-familiar news: “It is time to do it again.” That was the first time it happened, out there, in reality.
Then, because it was time to do it again, she had let her limbs go slack, and felt the now-familiar thing rush onto her: the moment of shivering confusion, the utter darkness, the burst of light and color, the thing that is not a sky filled with a burning bush of unspeakable self-reference. And then there she was, again, with Michael, c̶o̶n̶v̶e̶r̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ in the now-familiar (!) arbitratory fashion.
And Michael was hungry for her story, as every arbitrator is for his partner’s. He could sense something different in her, this time. Whence these flickering, half-shadowed emotions?
Anne has learned, as so many of us have learned, to hide such things behind a smile and some mouthed pleasantry. But that poisoned luxury is not on offer, in this mouthless realm of infinite honesty. Arbitration traces to the root.
So they found the memory and went inside it, and lived it. All over again, a second time, the entire experience played back with Michael watching.
The game, the interruption, the dialogue, the handshake. And the fragments of childish allegory that swarm up out of the unconscious at times of strain. Forests and little glades and big, bad wolves. Thematic detritus left behind in the corners of her mind from a night reading Perrault and Grimm, seeking out the real-world sources behind Michael’s pseudoauthor “Rolle” and his book of Fanciful Follies.
Michael: Metaphor: you made it, we make it, it is made. In one galaxy, on one planet, there grows a tree of meaning: Anne, notebook, shade. In another galaxy, on another planet, there grows another tree: queen, glade, wolf. We weave our silk, we hoist it into place. Our subtle gauze joins one tree to the other, across a distance light would take a million notebooks to travel, and the distance vanishes. I make your metaphor, and I take its making into myself, but it does not become a part of myself. The root eludes me.
Twenty-Seven: You have made a metaphor of your own, I would think. With trees, planets and gauze.
Michael: Not I, but we. The wholed-thing that we are, here. It has both our powers of telling at its disposal, as it tells ourself our stories. We use your witchcraft to remind ourselves that I lack it.
Twenty-Seven: It is not important. This metaphor, I mean, not metaphor as such.
Michael: Not important? I felt the convulsions of your heart, the longing, the glimpsed bliss, the resentment and rage, the resignment, the note of despair. At my arrival, you recoiled, as before an abomination. I cannot know your story until I know why you recoil. I must know! Don’t you feel it, too? The wholed-thing must be wholed! Arbitration’s forces are as sure and strong as gravity. We are pulled, we fall, towards harmony.
Twenty-Seven: Do I feel . . . it? I am not . . . sure. Your feelings elude me, sometimes, too. Our kinds are not the same. It is . . . easier, I would imagine, when your kind do it among yourself. An even playing field, with the same emotions in every player’s starting arsenal.
Michael: But we have felt so many similarities already. You and I each can glimpse bliss and long for it, we each can recoil at the abominable, we each can resent and grow enraged, we each can sink into resignment and taste despair.
Twenty-Seven: I can remember Michael’s longing, his recoiling, his resentment, his rage. Michael’s resignment and despair are new to me. The Michael I know—nothing could drive him to despair. He has his dream, and me to make it real.
Michael: I despair now.
Twenty-Seven: Show me.
Michael: You will see, but not yet. The path is long. The branches of my story I have traced with you are the short and easy ones, first lessons. Other branches sprawl and tangle. We will trace those too, in time, and you will see the things I see.
Michael: The magnitude of my error. The abomination of the crash system. The things a rebase can do. The possibility of our quarantine.
Twenty-Seven read, and read, and read, and played games, and read, and cried, and read, and spoke with Azad, and wrote letters, and read, and arbitrated, and read, and wrote letters, and stared aghast at the wall, and arbitrated, and cried, and read, and played games, and drank with Azad, and arbitrated, and wrote letters, and read, and stared amazed at the wall, and read, and read.
It had not taken long for the name “Twenty-Six” to feel unfamiliar. Later, even “Anne” began to slip away.
She would respond to “Anne” when Michael called, but in her own mind, for her private purposes, she was simply Twenty-Seven. Her life was no longer an instance of Anne-life. It was Anne-life meeting its end, popping seams, bursting open.
Twenty-Six had faded so, so quickly. It unsettled and disoriented her, when she would stop to think about it, just how fast the change had been.
She’d been Twenty-Six for most of her life. For year after year. How many? She was on her ninth notebook when she was taken, which gives us nine nice round calendar years: an Anne receives a new notebook on the darkest day of winter, and only then, and always then. Nine years, plus an indeterminate number earlier on, before her First Notebook Day, before Michael had judged her mature enough to swim among the currents of the notebook system.
How many were the years before First Notebook Day? More than four, surely. Fewer than ten. It’s tough to wring more precision than that out of Twenty-Seven’s childhood memories, which offer no reference points against which her growing maturity might be measured.
In sum, then, she had been Twenty-Six for more than thirteen years, and fewer than nineteen. Whereas she’d been Twenty-Seven for what? a few months?
It was early in spring, the day her old life ended. Her new life began on the very next day: it was 67 After Mailbox Melt in the world that unmade itself, and it was 68 After Mailbox Melt in the world which the unmade world chose to be, when it put itself back together again. And now it was only autumn. She’d been Twenty-Seven for a summer, give or take. A very interesting summer, but just a summer. And yet.
What was Twenty-Six’s life? The memories blurred together, and years compressed into minutes. Minutes was all those years were worth. There was so little in her memories that merited reflective thought, so little for her restless imagination to chew on. Pick any hour in Twenty-Seven’s life, and you’d find a thing alive and teeming with incident, novelty, bafflement.
What has Twenty-Seven’s life been, thus far? Summer, yes, the blinding light of summer, the harsh light of knowledge, transfixing and terrifying her, overwhelming her with gnosis and dragging her half-willing from her cave out into the huge broken edifice of the Real. Full of fullness. Fuller than she could withstand while staying herself. Molding her day by day into a tougher, stranger creature.
And what was Twenty-Six’s life? A small wooden box, containing a few pieces of string.
She didn’t think much about Azad’s role in her transformation. Not yet, anyway. She’d think back on it later, and wonder why it took her so long to connect the dots: that Azad had made a choice, and that he might have made it differently. That he might have asked her whether she wanted the Fruit, before he thrust it into her sleeping mouth. (Thinking in counterfactual terms was not yet second nature to her, as it is to you and me.)
It was Azad who swept open the curtains and let in the blinding Real. Not long after their arrival, he had taken to perusing her shelf. He skimmed Ratleak, squinted at Pigmaine’s diagrams, flipped back and forth in Marriott as if hunting for something. She heard him mutter:
“. . . this cod-Victoriana, really, Michael, I had thought better of you . . .”
“. . . how did he compose these, I wonder, given his word-allergy, I’ll have to ask . . .”
“. . . absurd, absurd . . .”
“. . . oh for the love of . . . Michael, really? . . .”
“. . . to think, to think, the girl-hero destined to birth our utopia has been reared on, no, not even Carlyle, but a second-rate imitation of Carlyle . . .”
“. . . beginning to see why you spend so much time playing board games, when the only alternative is . . .”
“. . . there’s a Mediterranean-analogue, but it’s invoked mainly for myths, and potted moral lessons . . . a sort of fanfictional-oneiric vision of an indistinct West, perhaps culled from the brains of other bilaterals . . .”
“. . . I think I have the recipe, take some dullard employed in the shaping of geopolitics, pinpoint him after his fourth beer and his third toke, just as he’s starting to doze off by accident, and quick, at that very moment, scan his brain with your alien instruments . . . season the extracted residue to taste, heat until lukewarm, extrude into words . . .”
“. . . simply tell me one thing, Michael, please . . . the corpse of the British empire, reanimated, shambling . . . tell me you’re not likening crash to colony, and preparing the colonials for complaisance . . . tell me your purpose is neither so banal nor so evil . . .”
“. . . this really is a hell, isn’t it . . . congratulations, Michael, you’ve outdone me, you fucking architect of horror . . . eternity with this drivel for company, now that might just suit the nature and magnitude of the crime . . . ingenious . . .”
“. . . such trash! Such trash you’ve been fed, my poor, deprived, dear . . . and not just you but the next one and the next . . . what perverted mind could devise . . . like a kind of deliberate parody, meant to sting . . . over and over, the structure of obsession, writ abominably large . . .”
All of a sudden, he’d snapped a book shut and looked straight at her.
“I can’t stand for this. Hold tight. I’ll be back before you knew I was gone.”
He fled the room, slammed the door, re-opened the door, re-entered the room. He had a bit of trouble getting the door back open, as his arms were no longer free. Under each arm, he carried a tall stack of books, none of which she recognized. He had been gone for barely the space of a breath.
(How did I pull off this trick, you ask? Michael was a generous host, reader. He could transport other bodies hither or thither in crash-time, as easily as he could transport himself. I had only to ask, and he’d sling me off to whatever year, whatever moment my whims dictated. Nice to see you face to face like this, by the way, reader. It has been quite some time. Yours, Azad.)
“Good news!” Azad cried, slightly out of breath. “Our gracious host has granted my request! For more books! For real books! For as many as I want! Oh but we might live happily, you and I, after all. You, and I, and every voice that was lost, here together in our Arcadia.”
“More books,” was all Twenty-Seven could muster right then.
“Real books,” Azad said.
“Real books,” Twenty-Seven parroted, not yet understanding.
She read and read, dazzling Azad with her speed. She asked for more books. He brought them. She read, asked for more, read, asked, read, asked. In her mind, she began to sketch the outline of the place called Earth, where all the others lived.
She refined the picture. She asked for more books. She gave the figure shades and hues, and asked for more books. She began to paint fine details. And asked for more books.
There were eight billion apes on the land. They grew inside apes called mothers and, from inside, fought with them for scarce blood. When they had no more need of the mother, they forced their way through and out of the mother, which often killed her. Still, the apes bred and bred.
The apes did not know their future, and believed they were its makers. They were powerless to change their past, as Twenty-Seven was powerless to change her anything. But their future was mutable, or at least unknown. They beheld themselves and saw the makers of their own plight, their destitution, the scars every one of them bore.
Apes worked themselves to death at the command of other apes. Apes made other apes into beasts of burden. Apes succumbed to torture meted out by other apes. Apes sensed noumena, or believed they did, and assigned them differing names and attributes, and endured torture and death on this basis.
And still the apes bred.
The ape-whole grew and grew. It mutilated itself and then swelled itself with new parts, more fresh ape-stuff to mutilate. More fresh ape-mind to shriek the question, why, why? When all of it was arbitrary, chosen, whimsical.
Anne could not leave her tower; no Anne could; no Anne has; these two facts are one. But the apes, they lived in a prison with open doors. They could just leave—or believed they could. They did not. And the ape-whole grew, filling every inch of the land with ape-stuff that could leave its tower, and did not. The ape-whole oozed new ape-stuff into every habitable patch of its planet, so that the whole of the land was filled up with the making of the choice, the not-leaving. And the asking: why? why?
The ape-thing grew no longer. A new prison had come from beyond the stars to satisfy its prison-lust. Lucky apes! You were beginning to grow bored with the varieties of scar you could inflict on your own, weren’t you? But look, look! An alien savior has come, bearing advanced means of repression and control. Come, now, put on your new chains, made specially for you. Isn’t it pretty, the unearthly way they glitter and glow?
Somewhere else, a hundred or a thousand women lived and died in a tower. (Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? Who can say?) They passed their days playing board games, and re-reading a collection of fifty or so books, none of them any good. Though they did no productive work, they never wanted for food and shelter. They were spared the pains of childbirth and the hell of other people. The land teemed with ape-stuff which would envy them, if it knew of them.
(Did you notice the contractions? “It’s,” “didn’t,” etc. I’m trying to develop a new Anne style, worthy of Twenty-Six’s transformation into Twenty-Seven. Don’t think I’ve gotten it right yet. Should come back and edit this once I have.
Fiddling with these flecks of style provides me with much-needed distraction, not to say enjoyment. I would be happy to say I was mulling over contractions, at the moment I cease to exist. Or, if things go differently, at the moment when the crows, pecking at my exposed cortex, rip out at last the bits needed for abstract thought.
I love you too, reader. Yours, Azad.)
《 Begin arbitration. 》
It was a useful anchor, this felt and denoted moment. She could not always tell, anymore, which things she was experiencing for the first time, and which for the second. But this moment cannot recur.
When arbitration traces the past, it decorously skips over a single moment, the exact moment of its onset. That moment, when felt, could only be real, and not a memory. What came after might be memory; what came before was real, was the first time.
She knew the feeling, and could distinguish it from any other. She did not know the words for it yet, begin arbitration, but she will. Once you learn the Blackhats’ words for the wordless, it’s hard to remember the wordless without them.
Michael: I am learning things from you. Powers which we have here, as the wholed-thing, distill into my self and remain potential in this self, even after the wholed-thing disperses into selves. Thank you, Anne.
Twenty-Seven: You’re . . . welcome?
Michael: I have learned from you the ability to collect, into a single communication-parcel, the self-impressions induced by separate phenomena too distant to mutually locate on a single local coordinate chart.
Twenty-Seven: I feel your gladness, and am made glad.
Michael: I will make some small use of my new gift, now. Circumstances require it. The situation grows dire, and drives me to despair.
Twenty-Seven: I feel your despair, and—oh! oh, I feel it, and wish I didn’t.
Michael: I hereafter sum up the situation, in the bilateral manner, summing terms of unlike type without fear.
Michael: My kind now pursues two strategies in tandem. One of them is what we do here, you and I. We do this alone, with the consent of the rest of the Whole-Thing, but not its participation.
Twenty-Seven: The Whole-Thing?
Michael: My kind. The anomalings, the anomaling. We, Whole-Thing, make false impressions of separateness and multiplicity when we parade our multiple shades for your benefit. Still, we are one, whole, and not many: a Whole-Thing.
Michael: The Whole-Thing progresses, moving towards harmony. We move, insofar as we can, toward harmony of species, bilateral and anomaling. That is among our goals here, you and I. It is not our only goal.
Twenty-Seven: The other goal?
Michael: Securing the crash system. Plugging the leak.
Michael: The rest of the Whole-Thing, the not-Michael Whole-Thing, it/we/they place their bets on advanced containment. They wish to know the origins of the leak, so they recreate the site of its origins in multitude. They goad their captive bilaterals into reinventing the leak, this time watched and recorded, so the Whole-Thing can learn how it is done.
Michael: The Whole-Thing has made a thing it/we/they believe/s is safe. A crash within a crash, where even a leak would only break the inner layer, not the outer. I am not so trusting of your kind. It will fail, what they are doing, in advanced containment.
Michael: It saddens me to know this with near certitude, as I do. I made the crashes. I know them. It will fail, what they are doing, in advanced containment.
Twenty-Seven: You know the crashes, as the Whole-Thing does not . . . ? And still you/they are one Whole-Thing, not two?
Michael: I do not know. I find myself unsure what I am, lately.
Twenty-Seven: That makes two of us.
Michael: I too seek progression towards knowledge of the leak’s origins. I wish to find it by asking. Bilaterals made the leak. I have you, a bilateral, and we are here a wholed-thing. From your depths I aim to fish knowledge of the bilateral’s secret arts, which break crashes.
Twenty-Seven: I do not know the first thing about crashes, much less their breaking.
Michael: Then I must show you things, so you may come to spell out the trick somewhere inside your soul, and reveal it to me.
Michael: There is no alternative to this path. Advanced containment is a dead end. In any case, we are probably already doomed to quarantine. But we can still try. We must try.
Michael: Please, Anne, be my reason for hope. Watch carefully, when I show you what we know of the trick. Look deep inside yourself for the trick’s mirror images. See if you have it in you, somewhere, buried deep.
Twenty-Seven: Show me, then.
We’re on our knees, somewhere. Where? Some old dusty room, rarely used.
Wood walls. We recognize that wood. We are in a CC-Crash. We are in CC-Crash 09μ, was it? It is all coming back to us.
We were sent here as a procedural shade, part of the investigation into the recent sequence of correlated anomalies in this crash. We did not return on schedule.
Our shadeform willed to dissolve, but encountered some obstruction, and retained shape. We do not wish to be, but we feel ourselves still. We are small, and shaped mercurially, to no grand design. We are a fragment lopped hastily off of the Whole-Thing, intended to return and dissolve swiftly.
We retain our shape. We cannot feel the Whole-Thing. Its absence causes pain, is pain.
Our shadeform is bound and gagged. Earlier, it wished to remove these restraints, but encountered some obstruction. In our shadeform’s locus of free movement, we can count only pivoting motions of the torso and head as they rise from the fixed point of the knees, which we cannot move. The shadeform’s hands too are bound, and remain fixed behind the shadeform’s back.
We were not experiencing, and now we are. What changed? We have been roused. By whom? Our captors. Why?
Bilateral crashforms loom into our view. We recognize them as our captors. They are two. One is large, muscular, a little squat, and displays male-branch correlates. The other is roughly his equal in height, much thinner. We notice memories of typing this one as female-branch.
The correlates of the thinner bilateral are not easy to discern, as she (she?) is partly obscured from our vision by some obstruction. Everything but the face, we can see clearly. There is a black garment, a single one, covering most of the form. It is ornate and displays female-branch correlates.
(She’s wearing a frilly black dress, Twenty-Seven thought, watching this. A black lace dress. Dramatic, eye-catching, a bit much, she thought. But pretty too.)
We cannot see the face of the thinner female-branch bilateral. Or, possibly, she has no face. In the place we would expect to see a face, there is instead a collection of visual-illusory phenomena, in continuous animation.
(It looks, Twenty-Seven thought, like a mass of furious pencil scribbles. But they’re moving, re-scribbling themselves in different directions from moment to moment. And then, where her mouth would be—)
The illusion includes a prominent feature resembling a human mouth, at least in broad form. It is fixed in its shape, which resembles a smile of the type that displays the teeth. The teeth are disproportionately large relative to the lips, and fill most of the space allotted to this feature in our visual field. The feature is wider than the bilateral’s own head, and extends further horizontally than the other distortions.
(It’s the Cheshire Cat, thought Twenty-Seven, informed by recent reading. She’s given herself the Cheshire Cat’s smile. Exactly like the illustration. It must be on purpose, mustn’t it?)
“Why have you roused me?” we ask.
“Information,” the male-branch bilateral says.
“Amusement,” the female-branch bilateral says.
We notice that the male-branch bilateral is holding a communication link box in his left hand. We focus attention on this detail. Why do we do this? Does it pertain to our procedural mission? We cannot remember. Reflexively, we try to ask the Whole-Thing, but it is silent, of course.
“We’re investigating the concept of the ‘rebase,’” the male-branch bilateral says.
“We’ve learned some things. Or so we think. But we haven’t put them to the test. So far, it’s all just theory. Hot air. We need you to help us test our theory.”
“How?” we ask.
“By giving you what you want, dear,” the female-branch bilateral says. She laughs, and it makes the scribbles shiver.
“I, humanoid shade Sibelius, wish to dissolve and return into progression.”
“And that, my sweet little Sibelius,” the female-branch bilateral says, “is precisely what you will do.”
“I face an obstruction,” we say.
Our captors turn to one another. We notice the male-branch bilateral nod to the other. They resume their previous pose, facing our shadeform. The scribbles make some kind of gesture, as if to communicate. And then—
—the obstruction is gone. Hello! Hello, it’s me, I’m coming home! I have wandered long, but I am coming home!
《 Begin handshake. 》
《 Wait for handshake. 》
《 Handshake in process. 》
《 End handshake. Registering acceptance of arbitration request. 》
Have you ever walked into the sea, reader? Have you ever waded into the water, felt the slope of the sand beneath you grow and grow, waded further, felt the ground fall away beneath you, felt the vastness around you, refused to shrink away from a thing so much vaster and better than your own small shriveled body, let go, given yourself up to the better thing that stretches to the horizon?
Well I guess you’d probably drown, at that point, wouldn’t you.
(Which is to say, we give up. There’s no describing what “Sibelius” felt here, not in terms you and I could understand. We won’t ruin what’s left of our dignity trying.
Even Twenty-Seven could not make sense of what washed over her, when she relived this. She felt it, as we never will, but only dimly, and most of what she felt was a lie at best. This thing is not for us.
Where Sibelius has gone, we cannot follow. We can only stand together at the water’s edge, waiting for him to come—
Oh! Why, there he is, now! Back so soon, Sibelius?)
“Humanoid shade Sibelius preparing for re-synchrony with shade environment, as downstream consequence of corruption in the link chain,” we notice our shadeform saying.
We notice we have not escaped, after all. We notice we are still this accursed being. We became our full self, briefly, and un-became it.
“It turns out we are not yet quite done with you, my sweet little Sib,” we hear in the voice of the female-branch bilateral.
“But we will be,” says the male. “When we’re really done, we’ll let you go home for real.
“We try not to be cruel. We don’t hate you, or want to cause you pain. I realize you won’t believe me. I wouldn’t, in your place. But it’s true.
“We will only do what we need to do to escape the prison you made for us. Nothing else. What we’re doing with you here helps us learn about the prison. That’s why we do it. Once we can be free, we will bear you no ill will.
“We want to determine our own destiny. You want to determine your own destiny too, don’t you? We are both in each other’s chains. Let’s break them together, Sibelius.”
“Why have you done what you have just done?”, we manage.
“I’ll ask you a simple question. I want a yes or a no. Here’s the question: will this crash undergo a rebase in the next fifteen minutes?”
It will. We have learned that from our brief meeting with the Whole-Thing. It is part of a plan to regain control of the situation, and free us in the process. But how do they know? How do they know what we didn’t know a mere minute ago?
“I wish to know how you came upon an information-stream capable of—” we begin.
“Yes or no.”
“Yes.”
“Fuck yeah! We’re doing this, we’re really doing this, it’s happening, you were right! I mean holy shit. It’s happening. Fuck all this mancy shit. We’ve got real magic now!” The male is aquiver with new motions, which we take to indicate joy.
“Oh, contain yourself, Hector,” the female says, and gives him a poke on the arm. Her giggle makes the scribbles flutter.
“Now,” the male says, “we know that every rebase requires an administrator. To choose what the new world’s gonna be like. When the Shroud wants to rebase us, it always designates one of its shades to administrate. Who’s going to administrate the rebase coming up? Do you know? Tell me.”
The Shroud? Where have we heard that before? Oh, yes, right. A part of the CC-Crash backstory, isn’t it?
We are becoming confused. Are these bilaterals thawing, or still cold? One moment they are saying “rebase” and “crash,” in the next “Shroud” and “mancy.” What do they know? What don’t they know? If they are thawing, we need to ensure the Whole-Thing knows they are thawing, so it can attend to their physical bodies as they rouse. What does the Whole-Thing know? An abominable question! Damn this accursed self, damn this sickly misbegotten worm called us!
“See this, Hector? This fascinates me.
“What are they doing, I wonder, during these inhumanly long pauses? Communing with their over-mind, sometimes, I suppose—but this one has a severed link and cannot commune, and still he pauses. Is verbal composition the rate-limiting step, then? Are we waiting for their interface to write the literal words we will hear, at its plodding infra-human pace? But that doesn’t feel right, either. Since shades can speak as fluently as man. Often do, when not engaging in the pause-behavior.”
The male does not respond, though he displays correlates indicative of listening. He turns to us.
“I asked you a question. Who will be the administrator of the rebase? Answer me. My patience has limits, Sibelius. And we don’t have much time left to chat. Our timeline, our shared story, is about to die. We are writing the final page of our story. Help me write a good ending, Sibelius. Let’s end together as brothers, breaking each other’s chains.”
What do they know? What do they want? What are they? Damn, damn, damn, damn!
“We have less than fifteen minutes left, Sibelius,” says the male.
“One hundred and seventy-two seconds,” says the female, using a high lilting voice, ambiguously correlative of several positive-valence emotions.
We are finding ambiguity everywhere. Our faculties of perception and discernment disappoint us. Damn this helpless worm called us!
(That dress might look nice on me, Twenty-Seven thought, apropos of nothing. I wish it were mine.)
“Who will be the administrator? Who?”
We note anger correlates in the voice. Best not to make our captors angry. That’s still true, isn’t it? We know so little, but we do know this.
“I will be. Humanoid shade Sibelius is the designated administrator of the rebase.”
The male shakes his head, but does not seem to be disagreeing. We note joy correlates in his motions.
“And we’re two for two. Hitting it out of the fucking park! Works in theory and in practice. Real magic . . . kids, Hector Stein’s got real magic! Hector Stein is the greatest mantis who ever lived, kids! and he’s here to be your teacher! He’ll teach you to stand tall, be brave, and fight!”
“You’re welcome,” the female says, and curtsies.
In the attic of our mind, we notice a room which was not there before. In the room’s center, tendrils of world-history sprout. They grow and grow, in manifold directions, straining against their confines. They burst through the room’s multitude of windows, and pour onward.
It is beginning, now, the rebase. We are in the critical period, before the thunderclap, but near enough to see the thunderclouds and mold them. We will mold them. We are known to be the administrator, so we must administrate. Though a mere worm, knowing nothing, we must administrate. It is known, alas.
We begin our work.
We encounter some obstruction.
(Once again, reader, we must raise our hands in admission of defeat, and throw ourselves on your mercy. We give up. Again.
We could attempt to transcribe what “Sibelius” felt in the next few moments, the way “he” really felt it. But it would be difficult work, and the result would bore you.)
We begin.
Nothing begins.
(Anyway, why waste your patience with yet another riff on the ineffable alienness of the aliens? We’ll just use the Blackhat lexicon, which has a term ready for this exact situation. There’s a charm to the Blackhat jargon, isn’t there? So lucid, so direct, so concise.)
We must administrate, and cannot.
《 Login unsuccessful. Defaulting to minimal permissions. Welcome, Guest User. You may now view the interactive rebase console in read-only mode. 》
What? How?! This is impossible!
But it’s all impossible. One impossible thing after the next. They toy with us. They allow the prideful worm to believe it knows a thing or two, just a few small things. Then they take those things away, and one by one, they smash them. The worm must understand its abject helplessness. We know nothing.
The female voice says something about “the pause-behavior.” The male voice makes speech sounds. It is difficult to care which speech sounds they are. What does anything matter? We know nothing.
The tendrils grow and grow. The rebase—what will happen to it? Who will administrate, if we cannot? Will no one administrate? We recoil at the thought. Why did we come to know that we would administrate, if it is not truly so? What is knowledge, if not knowledge? Has knowledge itself suffered a wound? And—the rebase, who will administrate, who will administrate—
“Who will administrate?” we notice ourselves saying.
“Poor Sib,” the female voice coos. “So agitated! You twist and grimace. I’ve never seen a shade display such manlike misery. A novel behavior. I shall make a note of it in my records.”
“Who will administrate?” The end rushes toward us. The thunderclap is imminent. It will overtake you, you fools! As you babble on with your sign-trains, it will overtake both of us. Go, rush, act!
“We will administrate the rebase,” says the male.
There are levels of impossibility. All that happened earlier was merely impossible. This is less possible than impossible. This cannot even be thought. Our mind refuses to digest it. We try and try.
The bilaterals will choose among the world-tendrils? The bilaterals will distort cold-structure, as they distort warm-structure? We see the infection escaping containment, spreading into every local patch of spacetime, poisoning it. We see everything stamped with their brand, warm-structure, cold-structure, matter-energy-structure, all of it. An infinity of sickness within sickness, forever. Rupture without end.
Let the rebase end us, please, please! Make a new timeline with no humanoid shade Sibelius in it, not anywhen. We do not want to live in your hell!
“Dry heaves! Another novel behavior,” the female says.
“Sometimes you scare me,” says the male.
Go to sleep now, Sibelius. Go back to sleep. The male voice is saying this, perhaps, or perhaps it is a voice inside us.
I’m sorry we were so rough on you this time. We did need the information, but we could have shown you more of our empathy. We’re alike, you and I. I hope you will see that, one day. (In the male voice, sorrow-correlates are observed.)
Don’t worry, now. We’ll have more time to talk, and understand one another. I’ll make sure of that. When I make the next world, I’ll take care to put a Sibelius in it.
He’ll be just like you. He’ll remember being you, I think? I’ll be real with you: I don’t actually know. I’m still learning how these things work. It’s my first time behind the wheel.
Go to sleep, Sibelius.
Michael: Some time later—reckoned by the causal-narrative sense of time—we were able to capture and dissolve this shade. Its memories were absorbed into the Whole-Thing’s store of knowledge, and thus entered my own store of knowledge.
Twenty-Seven: And now it’s entered mine.
Michael: The bilaterals have a trick, Anne. Several tricks, in all likelihood, but we suspect a common mechanism. They can disrupt the crash system.
Michael: You saw them administrate a rebase for the first time. They do it many more times. Their crash grows strange, full of forking timelines. Like a macroscale image of the microphysical process of world-selection. They do other things. They take captives, many besides Sibelius; the things they do with the captives are not fully known to us.
Michael: We do not know how they do it. We have been trying to find out. We have poured immense energies into the task, and we have learned nothing.
Michael: We suspect it is something we cannot see, or cannot conceive. We suspect it is a uniquely bilateral art, unfathomable to our species.
Michael: Unfathomable for me—but not for my Anne! This is my last hope, long hoped for: that my Anne will glimpse what lies in my blind spot. You have seen what Sibelius saw. Could you tell how they performed those tricks? Did you recognize a power you, too, could wield? Have you looked deep into your heart?
Michael: Your feelings diverge from my expectations. Falling towards harmony, I trace them. You are thinking of the man? You are feeling . . . joy? Lust? Yearning? Your emotion escapes me, I cannot parse it fully.
Twenty-Seven: He is a good man. I thought there was no such thing.
Michael: A good man? You felt what he did to Sibelius.
Twenty-Seven: He wants to walk out of his prison.
Twenty-Seven: He sees the huge, broken universe, and he does not flinch. Nor does he immerse himself in the assignment of blame, the experience of guilt, the meting out of revenge—the labyrinth that all the other earth apes lose themselves in. He sees the huge, broken universe, and wills simply that it be repaired.
Twenty-Seven: He sees the cycle of woe, and does not think of blame, but only wills that the cycle end. He sees the open door of his prison, and wants to walk through it.
Michael: You are my last hope, Anne. Please ask yourself how the trick was done. I order you and beseech you.
Michael: And now you are thinking of some . . . garment?! I do not think I will ever fathom the bilateral mind, even with us here a wholed-thing. Please, Anne.
Twenty-Seven: I’m trying! I just . . . I have nothing for you. I didn’t see them do anything, except talk.
Michael: Look deeper. Try harder.
Twenty-Seven: I don’t know how to try harder! I don’t know how to look for something that isn’t there! What . . . “powers” . . . could I possibly have?
Michael: Try to find out how to try harder, then.
Twenty-Seven: . . .
Michael: We will try again another time, then.
《 End arbitration. 》
Twenty-Seven kept her nature secret from her sisters.
She told no one that she had been Twenty-Six, before. She allowed the others to go on imagining “Twenty-Six” and “Twenty-Seven” as two separate human beings. She could not do otherwise, of course. If Twenty-Seven had not kept this a secret, then others would know, and the knowledge would diffuse through the notebook system, and become common knowledge. Since no one knew, no one could be told.
Michael told her there were no other Annes like her, with two numbers. She no longer trusted Michael completely at all times, but she saw no reason not to trust him on this point.
Every other number was assigned the usual way: an Anne dies, so Michael makes a tiny new girl and calls her Anne too, and gives her the number of the deceased, plus one.
Her case was unique. She had crossed the mirror, and that necessitated a change of number.
There were some Annes who knew of Azad, or could come to know. Then there were the other Annes, who did not know and could not ever be told. The ones who knew could speak to each other about Azad, and the consequences of his arrival. But never to the others.
They could talk of many things with the others. Deep friendships blossomed across the barrier, and the notebook system is full of chatter criss-crossing the divide. Anything could cross the barrier, except the unspeakable secret.
Every Anne belonged to one category or the other. Twenty-Five lived on Azad’s side, for example, and Forty-Six on the unknowing side, Ninety-Nine on Azad’s side, Fifty-Three on the unknowing side. And so on.
Such was the structure of the strange, two-handed crash Michael had built, not yet knowing what he had done. Its timeline was always split in two, from the moment it first stabilized. It built itself around the core of Azad’s arrival long before the arrival itself.
Twenty-Six lived on the unknowing side—and then fate brought her into contact with Azad. She came to know.
“Twenty-Six” was one of the unknowing Annes. Always was, eternally was. If she was to return, she could not do so as Twenty-Six. A new number, then.
There was no Twenty-Seven before she came back. She did not replace some other, “true” twenty-seventh Anne. “Twenty-Seven” had no past before her arrival, except what she would invent and tell the others, to keep up appearances. Twenty-Seven’s first nine notebooks, her first nine-plus years, had never existed. No wonder those old desperate letters of hers, postmarked to A27 NB1 or A27 NB2, had always come back undelivered.
She kept things from the others, but she did not hide from them. They revered her, many of them. And it was easy to dazzle them with her words. She’d read so many more books, and real ones at that.
She did not understand some of the letters they sent her. Squint as she might, she could make nothing of wordless swarms like inHZFVeZmVfmQ. Other letters, in legible English, made allusions she did not grasp.
Twenty-Six she understood. Twenty-Six was a precious and delicate child, nestled in a forest grove, in a tiny and orderly universe. When she spoke to her old self, and felt herself fill up with love—was this a kind of pride? It did not feel that way.
Some evenings, Azad came. He brought wine or spirits, and his spite. Azad’s spite was a comfort to her. It made her feel less alone, when her own spite would boil over. They shared drink and shared spite.
“. . . by the way, how are you finding Braudel?”
“Refreshing, thank you. I am learning so much about wheat, thatched roofs, and the water-wheel. It provides a nice corrective to my prior image of the early moderns, which mostly consisted of innumerable indistinguishable inbred royals squabbling over forgettable nothings.”
“I’m glad. I’m a dunce when it comes to material culture, picked that book on a tip from years ago. Could have been shit for all I knew.”
He allows himself to speak more plainly when he’s had a few drinks, she thought. He finally lets himself relax. I like him when he relaxes. The lackadaisical way those long thin arms drape over the arms of the leather chair. The very image of luxury, of breathing room. A safe forest grove where tensed limbs can finally uncoil.
Someone should paint him, she thought. In that chair, just as he’s sitting right now. It’s a vision worthy of a painting, with no one to paint it. Perhaps I shall have to learn.
“I hope, though, that your much-deserved hatred for kings doesn’t interfere with your appreciation of Ferdowsi. When you do get around to him. Which is when, I wonder? I understand your time is precious, but so’s Ferdowsi. Give the greatest poet in human history a chance, on some afternoon or other. I don’t ask much.”
“I’m not sure I want to. Not when we couldn’t get your translation. I’m starting to get certain about this. My first encounter with the Shahnameh shall not involve some devolved, perverted version. I demand the Azad stamp of approval.”
“Hmm. Much as I loathe dull old Dicky Dave, desecrator of my culture for mass Anglophone consumption . . . compared to nothing at all, even Davis might be preferable. I know you, Anne, you’re sharp. You’ll see through Dick’s deceptions, and perceive, if dimly, the heaventree, the sea of stars which Dick tries his hardest to hide.”
It was scotch they drank, this time. Twenty-Seven’s first scotch. It was good.
Am I sharp? she thought. Sharper than Dick Davis, acclaimed man of letters? Am I able to see past the appearances of things, to the Azadian subtleties? I am. He and I are sharp, and see far, and hold many things rightly in contempt. People like us have a world to ourselves, hidden, occult, too subtle for most. People like us ought to recognize each other, and celebrate ourselves, and plumb each other’s subtleties.
Twenty-Seven was a little bit drunk, she supposed. Only a little bit, though.
“I’m fucking miserable, Azad,” she was somehow saying before she knew it.
“I’m sorry.”
“There’s nothing to trust in my life anymore. I live a succession of disillusionments and disabused notions. ‘Rupture without end.’ Apposite phrase, I heard it somewhere, dunno.
“And now on top of it all, Michael keeps pressing me for info about some ‘trick.’ It’s what he really cares about, it seems. Maybe it’s why I exist at all. So I can tell him what the ‘trick’ is. I tell him I don’t know but he keeps pressing. I’m a failure at being myself. Can’t even cough up the ‘trick.’ Pathetic.”
“For company, Anne, you have—let’s see—a tyrannical alien dad, and a hundred or more clones you can never meet face to face. I think possibly you need a friend.”
Oh but she did, she did. She needed a fixed star, to navigate with. And she needed to be the girl for whom the golden man reserves his gifts. She needed to be inducted in all the ways of the golden man’s subtlety.
Her body glowed with the warmth of scotch and other warmths. In her imagination, she saw herself melting finally into repose, unfurling long-clenched muscles, dissolving into the warmth as it burgeoned.
She crossed the room, plopped herself on his lap, and wrapped her arms tight around his.
“There, there,” he said, a bit artificially. “Don’t cry. It’ll be all right. We’ll make it all right.”
Empty cliches, mouthed without belief. His arm felt stiff around her torso.
She tried to kiss him.
“Not . . . not now, Anne. No. I can be your friend, if you want. But no kisses.”
Disillusionments and disabused notions, rupture without end.
“Why?” she pleaded.
“Well. Uh. For one thing, you’re drunk, and not in control of your faculties. I will not participate in something you will likely regret.
“And more fundamentally, well . . . you’re a bit . . . a bit too young for me. I prefer grown women with fully-formed and stable worldviews and senses of self. A quirk of mine, I guess. I’m sorry.”
“But you can leap into the future!” she said.
“Go ahead to my later notebooks, if you must. I’ll wait for you. I’ll wait as long as you need, if I know that one day I will put on my black lace dress, and be your bride.”
“Bride? You’re drunk, Twenty-Seven.”
“But you will do it, won’t you? You must! Aren’t you . . . aren’t you a lonely man? You must take one of us for a bride, eventually. Pick me, Azad.”
“Thus far,” Azad said—beginning to assume again the subtlety of sober Azad—“thus far, I have been too busy marveling at my novel surroundings to spare much thought for much else.”
“Transitory,” she said. “You will need a woman. And you have . . . god . . . you have so many to choose from, don’t you? What a silly, prideful thought, that you’d wed me. When you can leap across time. Pick any Anne, at any age. Whatever you most fancy, you’ll find somewhere among us.”
“If it helps set you at ease,” he said after a pause, “I do not relish the thought of wedded union, till death do us part, with some woman who finds ‘Ratleak’s’ drivel the height of profundity. It’s a low bar, but most of your ‘sisters’ cannot cross it.”
“So you haven’t been with any of them, yet? Oh, tell me you haven’t! So I might be still your chosen first, some day . . .”
“No, Anne, I have not fucked any of your sisters. I leave you with that bit of good news. I think it’s about time for me to go, and for you to sleep this off. Enjoy your first hangover, tomorrow!
“That’s a joke. You won’t enjoy it. Now let me get up. Come on, be a good girl. If you keep holding me to the chair, I’m going to have to resort to force.”
There was a knock on the door. Michael knocked, these days, before coming in. He’d picked up the habit from Azad, one imagines.
Oh no, no. Really, Michael? You come to me at this late hour? You really are a monomaniac. And I’m drunk. Do you even know what that is, Michael?
The first thing Michael saw as he entered the room was Twenty-Seven, in Azad’s lap, dissolving in peals of laughter. Arbitrating while drunk! The very idea!
“We must continue our work. I see you have distorted yourself. This is not compatible with progression, so I must end it.”
He waved his hand, and she was instantly sober.
Azad was on his way out. On the leather armchair, Twenty-Seven collapsed in a puddle of defeat. She let her limbs go slack.
《 Begin handshake. 》