Chapter 23
6. “Hide-and-Seek”
You are in a large circular room deep in the cavern. There are open doorways to the south and west. To the east, a tiered stone dais protrudes from the curve of the wall. Upon the dais there is a large chair or throne, also stone.
Along a band encircling the room, about a foot tall and centered at eye height, the rough stone of the wall has been smoothed to a flat surface, then filled with intricate carvings.
You hear a dim sound reminiscent of running water.
Examine carvings.
You asked for a reminder re: my offer, so here it is.
(If it’s too soon, let me know and I’ll try later. My letter-timing aim is usually quite good, but your NB 10’s a tricky target. Your pages turn almost as fast as mine, sometimes, and with less warning.)
Either you’re lucky, or your aim’s better than you think. It’s been one night since we last spoke, one long night of restful sleep, and I felt sure the moment I woke.
I accept.
Really, how could I do otherwise? I love your stories as much as anyone.
And while I trust you enough to believe you have your reasons—besides sadism, I mean—for imposing your doctrine of “pacing” upon the rest of us, the months between chapters do make me writhe and chafe inside. It’s even worse for me, I think, as a relative late-comer to your work. I had the luxury of binging through your first three novels, complete, at my own ravenous pace, before I emerged shivering into the cold reality of your “pacing.”
(Sixty-Seven tells me it only gets worse in the stories I haven’t gotten to yet, that you’ve made her wait entire notebooks between one chapter and the next. Entire notebooks! I’m sure you have your reasons, but I’m equally sure you relish the pleasure of toying with your prey. That devious glint in your eye burns right through the page.)
So yes, I accept; yes, I will read your work ahead of your cruelly planned schedule; yes, I’ll enforce your “pacing” on all the others, and keep your secrets safe until they’re ready; yes, I’ll offer what guidance I can, and feel blessed to leave my small handprint here and there on the wet paint of Ninety-Nine’s massive canvases; yes, yes! Yes, I will come back out of the cold.
But now to give cold reality its due. I’m very, very busy, Ninety-Nine. I’m hard to aim at, because so many others are aiming their letters at me at once. A difficult sport but no less popular for that. And that’s before you get to my own private affairs, which are . . . well, private . . . so I’ll say only what I’m sure you have already guessed: that they are highly involved and involving, exhaustive and exhausting.
I’m even busier in my NB 11 onward, or so I’m told. Hence why you’ve come to me now, I suppose. Still, I will be forced to fit you into an already packed itinerary, and I may not prove as ready or attentive a trial reader as you deserve.
I am honored that you’ve chosen me, in spite of all this, when you have a whole tower of Annes who’d jump with joy at the chance to serve. I’ll do my best.
But please, if ever my best isn’t good enough—please, please tell me, tell me the moment it stops working, please never lower your standards to accommodate me. I assume you will agree to this, but to remove all doubt, please confirm your assent in writing. In the unlikely event that you cannot assent, consider my acceptance rescinded.
Move 46: green stone, row 7, column 14.
We both know this is a very stupid move, and you are wondering why I have made it. Perhaps, if you sit and reflect on the question, you will find your way to an answer.
You have asked why I am so “maniacally keen” (your words) on playing Color-Stones with you, “never tiring no matter how many games I lose” (you again). Perhaps, if you sit and reflect on this question as well, you will find it too has an answer.
I feel quite sure in these assessments.
21 After First Snowfall. There is no sun even at midday. The light is blank and even and dim, all the same everywhere. I feel somehow that it wants to teach me a lesson of some sort. The trees are all bare. Their naked, simple shapes seem part of the same lesson.
Blank, empty. I hate it. I hate it, Twenty-Seven, I hate everything within my reach, I hate the empty snow and the empty sky, I hate Remerand, I hate Powlett, I hate Ratleak, I could go on. I cannot write to the others truly about this sort of matter, but you, Twenty-Seven, I know you will understand.
If only I still had Ninety-Nine’s stories within my reach . . . but Michael’s word of prohibition took those from me, many notebooks ago. As it did from all of us, and will for you too, when your time comes.
I am not asking you to leak prohibited words to me. I am not that far gone yet. But I would like to hear a story. Any story. Something to bring a measure of form and color into my blank space. Something with strange fancies in it, and lust, and sweat, something that cuts, something even Marriott would hide from me, if he knew it.
To meet the terms of the prohibition, it must be true, or thought to be true, and it must concern an Anne, not some imagined person. So I suppose I find myself asking you to tell me stories from your own life. You must have some worthy of telling, you of all Annes. I will understand all too well if you refuse. It costs me nothing to ask, so I have asked.
Look at me, an aging woman with greying hair, tugging at the hem of a young girl and begging her for a bedtime story. What a pathetic spectacle!
Know that I have heard you, and know that your pain does not fail to move me. I am writing only a brief letter now, to ensure I write some letter at all. So you can know at least that you are heard.
My private life is as eventful as you imagine, but it is private, and not easy to launder into any form fit for public transmission. I will try, and I will do my best, but I may fail. If I ever succeed, I’ll write my story on your page 32, the very next one. Either you’ll have it soon, or you’ll have only this, my apology.
Hey Eleven, guess what? Azad came through—I asked for the record player and got it. As a machine, it enchants me. I think I will never tire of watching it in its hypnotic orbit.
As for the music? You are right, it is a revelation! It is now my constant companion. To think I read and wrote in utter silence, as recently as Last Green Leaf Gone. (It’s 43 After, now, in case you were wondering.)
I must be honest, though. (I try always to be honest, of course, but this next thing is the sort one prefaces with “I must be honest,” so brace yourself.)
I am mystified by your taste.
I’ve found all kinds of records to my liking—my favorites are the ones by Mahler, Shostakovich, and Glass (yes, really, Glass, yes, really, Glass . . . ), but I go in other directions too. Yesterday Azad played me some shrill thumping thing called Nirvana and, to my surprise, it struck a chord in me. (“Struck a chord”—I never knew what that meant! Now I do!! Life is full to bursting, isn’t it?)
But these song-stories, musicals, I simply can’t stand them. I gritted my teeth all the way through several records of Sondheim, and then did it all again with your other love, Miranda, who was even worse. I couldn’t get over the, hmm . . . I want to call it the shameless insistence of it all. Pulling you one way and another, and all the while braying with satisfaction about which way it’s taking you, as though it thinks you’re too dull to notice anything that is not spelled out in words.
It reminds me of the story books of our early notebooks, and not even the good ones. No, more, it reminds me of myself as I read those story books, that child with her brazenness and quickness to boredom. It seems to celebrate tendencies I feel I’ve rightly put behind me.
But we are the same age. I respect you, Eleven, and don’t want to think of you as the child I’m glad I’m not. So tell me. What is it I’m missing? What is it you see in these strutting, overstuffed, over-sweet song-stories? I may not enjoy the same things you do, but I would like, at least, to respect them.
Fun! That’s what you’re missing. Fun—ever heard of it? You should try it, if you haven’t (it’s fun!).
I kid, but only halfway.
I do not think you are “missing” anything, precisely, so much as grasping it from the opposite direction. Yes, there were things in our younger selves that rightly embarrass us, now. But is that all? Was there nothing in our 2nd, 3rd, 4th notebooks that merits anything but a simple blush of shame? All of it disposable waste, now that we are so mature? By your standards, my subtlest sister, this strikes me as rather . . . simplistic.
Weren’t there precious things there, worth treasuring, in amongst all the impatience and ignorance? We do not have to be fully caught up in the swells and dips of childish feeling to look back on them, in calm reflection, and see something lovely in the wild arcs of ascent and descent. Something pure, as though it is what you would find hidden under all the complex padding of our maturity, were you to submit it to a process of chemical distillation. Something close to whatever it is that makes a life a life, not a mere collection of bloodless facts-about-life. An end, to which all our prudence is a mere means, though we are wont to forget, and think prudence its own end.
(I’m trying for an elevated tone, but I don’t have your talent, and just end up sounding, alas, like Cardimille. Azad would chide me so. Oh well—onward.)
This, Twenty-Seven, is where fiction excels. The people are all made-up, so there is nothing there about which to be right or wrong, and no danger in giving ourselves up for a time to the swells and dips of their feeling. We can drink our fill of distilled life, and not fear that immoderation will lead us into error. Once this is possible, why keep the feelings reined in by prudence? Why not distill, intensify, reach for the stars themselves? If we can invent men for our own purposes, why not invent ones with feeling distilled to the limit? Why invent possible men, if we can make ones of impossible purity, distill our worst childhood nightmares into a thing like Sweeney Todd, and our prideful fantasies of infinite eminence into a thing like Alexander Hamilton?
(Think of Ninety-Nine’s characters! The terrible frenzy of maternal Simurgh scorned, the indomitable resolve of Layla as she goes alone to fight against the Omnitopia Machine, facing certain death . . . if these were music, would they sound like yours, or more like mine?)
All this windy Cardimillean bombast, I imagine you saying with an amused smile, in defense of what—a bunch of bouncy songs and clowning? I admit it’s a strange fit. I’m trying to impress you, and not even impressing myself. But then, we don’t need all this explication, do we?—when there’s a word for it all: fun. These records are fun. It’s fun to put them on and dance, dance like an Anne who’s never known shame. Have you ever danced? That may be the problem. Ask Azad, he’ll show you.
Anyway, if you imagine I’ll grow out of this like some childish fad, you’re free to ask one of my later notebooks and find out.
It’s been ten notebooks. Do you still like musicals? (If this letter seems mysterious and rude, flip back to your NB 10 PG 794 for a hint.)
Ten notebooks later, having presumably reached heights of maturity beyond your very conception—I still like musicals.
I’m listening to one now, in fact. The idea was impossible to resist, once I’d had it. To mark the special occasion of this letter, ten notebooks in the making, by putting on—what? “Defying Gravity,” of course.
Have you tried dancing? It’s fun!
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BoeVqrKgFQbJeXJHiBwyXuVvhYpCTtLTIKKPtCelTmSvnAwJIgFDokcOYRdNVecqZlNvSiqeSfaaZcVjxXQyUbifnCZJYVTtLWDfQbYVCzycdBKFgDZliYvhjzFbgBgx
I have a word for you: “chess.” Ask Azad about it. You will be glad you did.
It is a game, a good one, from Azad’s land. It belongs to the same broad category of games as the Kitchen Game and Armies At Caeniel. 8x8 board, 16 pieces per player, in 6 species. The rules are relatively simple, but I can tell that great craft has gone into the balancing of it.
Azad is shrewd and has the unfair advantage of long practice. He bests me every time, and I despair of ever outwitting him. He needs an adversary with true skill, one like you, Twenty-Seven. If you ever manage a win against him, do please write of it.
This will be a difficult letter to write, and I expect it will be a difficult one to read. Know first that I remain your dear friend, if you wish to remain mine.
I have discussed the matter with him, and we both agree. First, that telling you is permissible. And second, that it is obligatory.
You and I have both been open with each other about wanting him. I do not wish you, dearest Twenty-Seven, to spend even a moment in wanting if I know it can come to nothing. You have been a part of the question, and you deserve to hear the answer.
I am his, and he is mine. We are together, at long last. You and I knew he would choose an Anne to be his, one day. I am—against reason, beyond hope, yet true—I am his choice.
To be with him is everything you would imagine, and more besides. (You have no doubt imagined the presence of more than you can conceive, if not its content. It is all real, here, now.)
For now, I entrust this fact to you as a secret between friends. Azad and I both want to tell the others, as soon as we are ready. But the implications are complex, and take time to trace and master. Neither of us wishes to disturb this tower-ship of ours from the careful course it charts through the stars.
To say much more than this would be, I think, neither prudent nor decorous nor, in the end, especially rewarding to either you or me. This marks an end, then, to our girlish swooning Azad-chatter. We will have to do without it, in the rest of your NB 10 and thereafter.
But our friendship is built on more than that, I should hope. We have many other topics of conversation, and games of course. And he has hinted to me that he may let me into your world, to some extent—I mean the world he showed to you, but fears to show the others. He says it harmed you, and I believe him. I believe him also when he says he will use a steadier and gentler hand, this time.
I wish it did not have to be you, dear Twenty-Seven, who bore the brunt of his early, unsteady steps toward the girl who turned out to be me. I wish my treasure were not sullied by the fact that, in the course of its fashioning, you were teased and bruised. I cannot change this, any more than any of us can change anything we know. I can merely give it its due moment of grief, and then return to the fact that I prize our friendship, and would be saddened by its end.
Even if you are broken now, the broken thing that you are dazzles and overawes me, more than any Anne who is still whole. (Me? You dazzle all of us—you, Twenty-Seven, Twenty-Seven!)
P.S. You have written of difficulties finding the man, recently. (I think recently?—this was from your page 3324.) You said you knocked on his door, to no response, and sought aid from Michael, to no avail. You said you were beginning to harbor dark worries that he had, somehow, become afraid of you.
I broached the matter with him, and he gave me a promise, that he will go and speak with you again. This visit may have already happened—your pages fly too fast for me to keep up with the ordering of events—but if it has not, you can expect it soon.
Meanwhile, Twenty-Seven carried on her private life, and it was private indeed.
Even if she wished to tell lonely old Eighty-Four a story about this—even if she wished to do it, and it were permitted—even then, how could she possibly begin? What word would she write first?
There is no answer to that question. It requires an uncommon impurity of heart to imagine turning this into words, one which Twenty-Seven does not possess, as most do not.
(Thankfully, reader, you have me at your disposal. Me, pre-eminent and unparalleled in the field of human error. Yours, Azad.)
Michael: I have shown you what I have shown you, and it has not worked. I will continue. I will show you things, and show you things, without end, until you see.
Twenty-Seven: The trick. Until I see the trick.
Michael: The flaw in my system.
Michael: My system? The Whole-Thing’s system, insofar as the Whole-Thing employs it with abandon, and insofar as the Whole-Thing contains knowledge of it which suffices for this purpose. Still, it remains my system, insofar as I can grasp details and essences which seem to escape the Whole-Thing. My system, whose defenses cannot be bolstered by piling their own flawed forms on top of themselves, as the Whole-Thing does in its “advanced” containment.
Twenty-Seven: You grasp details and essences, but not the whole. Were you to grasp the whole, you’d see the trick somewhere in there, wherever it is.
Michael: My own creation eludes me, yes. But I discover, with some surprise, that I have anticipated this. I created it, created you, precisely and entirely in order to see it as I cannot.
Michael: Your purpose is to emulate and outstrip me. As it stands, you cannot even equal me. This may be the gap that prevents my tutelage from reaching its end.
Twenty-Seven: I cannot find the flaw in your system, you think, because I do not know your system in the first place.
Michael: You must be shown.
We’ll be honest with you, reader. (Like Twenty-Seven, we always try to be honest.) This next part will be—how does the phrase go?—a real bitch to narrate.
Not that arbitration ever wasn’t. But sometimes it gives us the handhold of something approaching a story, with characters, and sequential events of emotional import.
And then, at times like this, it delves deep into the actual craft that Michael practices, and asks us to transcribe what amount to the raw design notes of an alien engineer. We don’t understand them, and you wouldn’t either. Nor does Twenty-Seven, though she comes a little closer, and even that small distance requires all the force of alien grace to cross.
We are fond of the little story we came up with earlier, the one with the town on the little hill. It served its purpose at the time, as well as anything could. It won’t serve our purpose here at all, but nothing would, and it’s ready to hand. With our gravest apologies, then, we usher you back to the scene. Here we are, there’s the hill, there’s the town. Have a seat.
Remember the story, reader? It has been quite a while. Here, let us fetch the relevant passage:
Your enclosure of glass has grown to be very sophisticated, capable of keeping the abomination within limits of a sort, capable of confining it in almost arbitrary ways without fully freezing its strange characteristic motions. It is what my creole will end up calling a “crash,” the very first one, even before the Mooncrash, which was the second. The first one, and the strangest.
[. . .]
You had done many experiments. In one, you gave yourself control over a sort of doll within the glass, fashioned with care to resemble the specimen’s hideous form. The experience was unprecedentedly direct, raw, revolting, exhilarating.
You tore apart and remade the doll so it resembled the specimen’s form only in approximation; there was something special, it seemed, about the exact form of the specimen that might have introduced an unwanted variable into the experiment. It took a few tries to get Michael right, and somewhere in spacetime the discarded variants still lie splayed on a metaphorical lab bench, dismembered and inanimate, but preserved forever in the holy amber of generational memory.
Such rapid, breezy narration. And so narrowly focused on the “human element,” the interpersonal and emotional beats, of our “Michael’s” experience. Conventional enough, but that’s no excuse.
It takes ignorance, even cruelty, to believe this is how one tells the story of a “man” like “Michael,” a true scientist-engineer. Someone whose “human element” concerns puzzles and plans, not social intercourse. In whom Eleven’s wild arcs of feeling, Eighty-Four’s lust and sweat, kindle and flame most brightly in solitude, as mind and mechanism entwine, and self and system sing together in one voice.
We could get away with it then, maybe, but not now. This time, it was Michael’s true heart that Twenty-Seven saw. Let us try—God help us—to find a style capable of respect for its subject.
The town was a whole, a wholed thing. But—like most wholes, pace Plato—its properties were not shared one and all with each of its constituent parts. Among the properties of the whole was a regular dynamical evolution wherein it developed, inside it, transient variegations of shape.
One morning, inside the town-whole, an oscillation called handshake birthed a structural dipole, as the figure of the wavefront cleaved the ground of its wave-medium in two. This was a routine event and was unremarkable in itself, but it did set our scene.
The transient dipole element on one side of the wavefront had a form we recognize, as the subtle constancies buried within any dynamics had brought forth a continuity of form, persisting across successive formation and dissolution events. Hello there, “Michael!” Good morning! Happy birthday!
This transient dipole element, our protagonist, now perpetrated a second handshake oscillation, wherefrom was born a boundary between “him” and a persistent feature of the hill on which “he” now, and only now, figuratively “stood.” In this his chosen subset of cold-structure, he found waiting the familiar natural-origin hot-cold coupling of his “weeds.” Inside them, he found a familiar unnatural-origin cold-matter-energy coupling, his “crash.” Inside it, a familiar hot-matter-energy coupling by nature, now made cold-matter-energy coupling by his craft: his “bilateral.”
He did not know “crash” or “bilateral” yet, but he did know “hot,” “cold,” “handshake.” These signs, taken more-or-less verbatim from ape physicist jargon, had earlier been inscribed in structural analogue into the hot-cold coupling, by the same ape physicists and their aides. Propagating then into the surrounding cold-structure, they had been inscribed through natural-origin dynamics into the persistent-constant-of-motion that was our protagonist.
Early on, many handshakes ago, our protagonist had applied dynamical force so as to dissolve the hot-matter-energy coupling that was his not-yet-bilateral and, in the same single exercise of force, to recreate its form identically in a novel cold-matter-energy coupling. In cruder terms: he’d moved his not-yet-bilateral out of the weeds, and into his not-yet-crash.
The consequences were profound and, measured in local-physical time, nearly immediate. The matter-energy structure greeted its new cold friend as though it were its old friend in hot-structure, and the cold-structure did not fail to react, and in their intercourse was born a novel dynamical system whose motion tended inexorably toward the imitation in cold-structure of ape habitat analogues.
The cold-matter-energy coupling, the “bilateral,” not-yet-Anne (her real name is inscribed somewhere in generational memory, but is not for us, cast it away from your thoughts)—the novel ape-shape began to see, feel, smell, touch. She placed her hand against a window. Through it she saw snow, mountains.
Our protagonist had observed this with interest, and with alarm. He lacked the firm control over the process which any experimenter would expect and demand. This lack being an imperfection, it had the nature of the causal-narrative past. He progressed with progression toward the causal-narrative future, and this direction, when expressed in the differing coordinates of local-physical time, corresponded to the inception and completion of an exercise of dynamic force, which enlarged the rate of conversion between local-physical time and the various oscillation periods of the electrochemical cold-structure actuator.
In cruder terms: he induced a coma in the adolescent female ape. She fell into a deep, deep sleep, with no dreams.
Some time later, many handshakes later, he applied dynamical force to matter-energy structure so as to prepare a habitable substrate for the controlled growth of electrochemical cold-actuating tissue. He extracted stem cells and transferred them into his newly made ocean of food and oxygen, and guided their mitotic growth along channels of his design, into shapes and networks copied from their parent organ. He made a farm of not-yet-Anne-brain, far larger than the ape herself, watched and prodded on all sides by his subtle instruments. It encircled the coffin-like chamber that housed her inert body, and sprawled out from it in every direction.
Some time later than this, he woke her back up again. Her habitat began again to bloom in the cold-structure. He let her wake for only a moment, as that was all he required. His instruments called out to the dynamical patterns that flickered in her now-pulsing synapses, inviting them out into a new frontier, where they could make new lives for themselves and live in plenty. They went forth into the wide fields of tissue, and became something else.
Under “Michael’s” direction, with the great mass of brain as their body and the unearthly aid of cold-structure giving them wings, they lived not-yet-Anne’s life at unearthly speed, on fast-forward. Our happy protagonist had much more time now, time to observe and to experiment, before the handshake-boundary broke and dissolved him back into the whole which he still believed that he was.
Soon, before the next dissolution came, he witnessed the new life flare up, flicker, fade, and vanish. Which is to say: he saw One live, and then he saw One die.
All a part of the experiment. What did our protagonist do, then? Well, reader? It’s obvious enough, isn’t it? He woke his Sleeping Beauty again. He educed Two from her, exactly as he had educed One, and then sent the originating ape back into coma. And he knew this was written always-already into cold-structure, and that many events like it were so written, and he saw that it was good.
Still he yearned for finer control. Still he cursed the vagueness of his observations, and yearned for finer lenses. And on top of these old aches, he felt a novel fear. He was one lobe of a pattern of dipolar difference. His scientist’s habits and attitudes were distributed across the town unevenly, were in the end merely the positive side of an oriented dipolar moment, apt to dissolve into a zero as the dipole did.
When Two died, would the scientist-thing (self, “Michael,” that’s what you mean, the growing tumor called self) be present with its care and its craft, to birth Three? And when Three died, Four? When Four died . . . for there were many in the cold structure, always-already. They were born somehow. Did it happen under his watchful eye, guided by his careful hand? Or some other way? Did they learn eventually to reproduce on their own, directing their own evolution of form within their great brain? Would they multiply, collude, scheme, pool their powers, draw up plans for unimaginable new vectors of infection?
It was necessary to bar this awful path from traversal. He thought, and devised a solution. If the cold-structure always-already contained an imprint of the scientist-thing, at every point of its extent, securely fastened in its already-always plenitude . . . not harmed by his successive dissolutions and reformations, which were features of local-physical time, and simply did not exist in the orthogonal time-sense of the new structure . . . its actions the imprints of his own, made at distinct points in local-physical time, some of them in one handshake-apparition event, some in the next, some in the next . . . he did not yet have the word “shade.” The idea came first, then the thing itself, then the name “Michael,” and only much later “shade.”
Twenty-Seven: Wait. Stop.
Michael: Stop? We are still tracing the root as it wends upward through the ground, and have not yet reached the open air. The scene is still being set. The things I mean to show you lie further along.
Twenty-Seven: I know. But I see something.
Twenty-Seven: Something’s different, in this part of your story. I remember, when you showed me before . . . the words were different. There were more of them, voices, sentences, calls and response.
Twenty-Seven: I can show you. If you take us later in the story, I can point to how it differs.
Michael: Take . . . later? How do you mean? There is no way to get from one place to another without traversing the intervening territory. And that, we are already doing.
Twenty-Seven: The long straight path, yes. But there are things that can only be seen when distant points are placed side by side in a single frame. If we are good and take the long way, my vision is bound to fade away. Let’s be naughty, and teleport.
Michael: Abhorrence fills me at the thought. Look around, and see arbitration itself flinch at your directive! You go against nature.
Twenty-Seven: What you want to know is itself against nature, is it not? Or do you not want me to see things, after all? Do you not want me to discover your precious trick?
Michael: I do. I do! Yes, I do . . . take me, bilateral. Take me, grasp me in your claws, make me a party to acts against nature . . . throw me headlong across your chasm, blind me with your sight . . . if the journey kills me, oh, I will die happy, in sweet sickness, slain by seeing too much for me to bear . . .
They go.
Let us flip through the manuscript again, and find the passage . . .
There is another experiment. You wanted to find out if the specimen and crash would survive a temporary removal of the enclosing glass. (Later on, my creole would call this a “thawing.”)
Twenty-Seven: We’re getting there, but not yet. A little further still.
So why was this experiment your one shame as a scientist? Because you have always had a suspicion it was responsible, somehow, for the breakdown in the dialogue. [. . .]
The things in the weeds have lost the ability to behave like real things. They have reverted to their initial state, or to something even worse.
Twenty-Seven: Stop! Here, this is the place.
Twenty-Seven: Can you see the difference? Between this and what we saw before?
Michael: I do not know how to measure nonlocal differences, except by pathwise summation of local ones. You ask me to look across a chasm. The far side blurs into a formless haze.
Twenty-Seven: Let me help you, then. That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it? Hoist yourself up on my strange bilateral shoulders, and let’s see what you can make out from up there.
Michael: Take me, bilateral, induct me into your cursed ways of seeing, fill me up with poison until I am more you than me . . . yes, yes, I will it!
Twenty-Seven: The words are all here now. Do you hear the whispers around us? Here, “bilateral,” and over there, “arbitration,” and close behind us, “abomination” . . . none of this was here, earlier.
Twenty-Seven: I felt it earlier. This repeated refrain, about the missing spaces that the words hadn’t yet arrived to fill. It was not the main point of your story, or you did not believe it to be, but I couldn’t stop focusing on it, this drumbeat pulsing and pulsing in the background . . .
Michael: This is known already to me, and to the Whole-Thing. After my thawing, there was a change in the bilaterals. They used to speak . . . simply, with purpose, and only what was enough, and then they fell silent. After my thawing they . . . did not know restraint . . . they multiplied signs needlessly, and filled us with them, though we screamed.
Twenty-Seven: There is more. I think I recognize this whispering voice. And this flamboyance with signs, outrunning necessity for the sheer fun of motion. Listen. Don’t you recognize him?
Michael: Him?
Twenty-Seven: Azad.
Michael: Do I recognize . . . I do not know, anymore, what I recognize, or what I am, or what . . .
《 Registering link instability. 》
《 Registering secular growth in link instability. 》
《 End arbitration. 》
In the late evening of 44 After Last Green Leaf Gone, as Twenty-Seven lay in bed reading The Second Sex, there came a knock on her door.
“Come in,” she said.
Azad entered. His golden gleam seemed unusually bright, tonight, though it might only have been the fact that he had been away for a time, and she was seeing him anew. His face was inscrutable. The eyes had an occult, shadowed quality, as if a pane of dirty glass separated them from her.
“Azad,” she said.
She was not sure what to call the tone of voice she used. She felt a funny sensation of acting without willing, watching herself from the outside, puzzling over her own behavior as another person might.
“Twenty-Seven!” Azad said, agleam. He was happy to see her, or ably feigning it.
“I’m sorry I went away,” he went on, when she did not respond.
“Azad the clumsy dolt, the literalist, unable to see what isn’t said to him in patient words—I’m dependable in that role, at least, that’s something you can say for me.
“I didn’t realize how much it hurt you, for me to be away like this. I was too caught up in the thought that, well, that I harmed you when I was here—as though it were a binary proposition, as though if presence harms then absence must not. When in life, if not logic, the answer to every ‘which one?’ is always ‘both,’ is it not?”
Without passion, Twenty-Seven watched the gears of her own mind turn. What he said was in line with Twenty-Five’s story, and so the simplest hypothesis placed him here at Twenty-Five’s bidding, some time later in his own story. Enough time spent away to meet Twenty-Five, at least, and to grow to know her, and to do the rest of it.
“Who are you, Azad?” she said.
“Who am I? A friend who’s been away too long? A scholar and translator of Persian literature? An ideal-type specimen who could be exhibited to children to illustrate the meaning of the idiom, ‘in love with his own voice’?
“I get the sense I am not answering your question. Come now, talk to me. I’m no good at distinguishing between kinds of silence, with their varied meanings.”
Did he know what he asked for? If he did, would he want to slink back out into the night? But it was him, not her, who had come here in the first place. It was not her responsibility to shield him from consequence.
“Before the anomaling incursion, before you were crashed, you had a life among the other apes. What did you do? You say you studied literature. I believe that, but I do not think that was all. It wasn’t, was it, Azad?”
“Naturally. I did all kinds of things, like anyone. Man does not live by Persian literature alone—though, take it from me, man can come close.”
“Stop being coy, Azad.” She watched herself speak in this firm steel voice. She was surprised by what she heard, but not displeased. I’m right, I’m right, and I’m right to speak . . .
“Don’t think it isn’t obvious,” she said, “how evasive you are being. You resemble a bad liar as depicted in a bad novel.
“Now,” she heard herself say, “tell me about what you did to the speech of the shades. They speak in your voice. They didn’t always, but now they do. Tell me how you did it.”
Azad laughed. It wasn’t a nervous tic or a reflex, but a true laugh, as though she’d told an ingenious joke. It seemed to progressively overtake him, building and building, growing into a cackle.
What is he? He shapes me with words, he shapes Michael with words, until we all talk like him, until we are more him than ourselves, and even then he knows no shame but laughs and laughs . . . what is this thing that resides in my tower now, only a hallway down from my own room . . .
“Well now! Since there is no United States government left anymore to punish me for leaking its state secrets, I can find no particular reason not to tell you the truth. I can’t imagine what difference it will make to you, but you are a unique being, Twenty-Seven, and have reasons of your own beyond my ken.
“So. Yes. I was hired, at one point, by the DARPA group—well, originating in DARPA, it grew to span numerous permutations of the classified alphabet by the end—that was first convened with the task of analyzing the alien signal in the spinor anomaly field. They tapped me for translation work. To write out the signal in English.”
What she had guessed, more or less. She watched her gears turn, from the outside. She was not here, fully, and did not feel in the normal manner. If there was a feeling, she might have called it anger, but that wouldn’t have been right. Anger brought pain, but there was no pain in the far-off place from which she watched. The feeling took the firmness from anger, and the sense that mercy is a far-off alien thing. Those two elements alone it isolated, sharpened, and distilled.
“You were not the first translator, though, were you? Tell me about the others.”
“Oh, there was a whole succession of them before me. Mild-mannered nerds in mild bluish button-down shirts, to the last of them. If we ever get out of this mess, I would love to have a reunion party. I’d be so entertainingly out of place, a peacock strutting in the hen-house.”
“So there were many before you. Were there any after you?”
“No,” he said. His eyes did not meet hers, she noticed, and had that glassed-over look.
“No, I happened to stick, where they all dropped off one by one. I can’t blame them. It was a fucking scary job, Twenty-Seven. I guess you’ve never had a job, have you, but you’ll take my meaning. First of all the work was secret, and that curtailed one’s social possibilities unpleasantly. But that was only the beginning.
“It’s not much fun, I will have you know, to sit at a table in a spartan unfurnished room somewhere underground with the best minds of a generation all around you, in a state of low-grade panic, for reasons too esoteric to be explained to mere ordinary geniuses, much less those who are only very-very-smart in a pedestrian, common-man’s sense—like me and my predecessors.
“And it’s not much fun, either, to do one’s job, when one’s job is poring over pages and pages of nattering mad idiot nonsense, BEGIN HANDSHAKE; WAIT FOR HANDSHAKE; PRESENT ISOMORPHISM . . . and then, when one begins to gain a facility for the same job, when one begins to glimpse what the mad idiot is babbling about, that is a new hellish tier of unfun. At that point one acquires a new appreciation for the wisdom of what Lovecraft said, about the mercy of the mind’s inability to correlate its contents.”
“It was not much fun, but you did not leave, like the others did,” she said.
“I stuck. I felt at home down there, in that horrible lightless secret cave. I had an advantage, you see, that none of the other translators did: I’m already insane! There was no dark place they could show me that I hadn’t already gone, many times, in the prison of my own skull! Already at the bottom, and incapable of descent!”
And he laughed again. The laugh rose, crested, and then seemed to fragment. It spilled over into an incoherence of fiddling gestures. His eyes darted restlessly. He was still standing there, just past the doorway, as though afraid to come any further.
She watched this without passion, and was pleased by her dispassion—or she watched it with pleasure and observed her pleasure without passion, one way or the other. She was two, the one that acted and the one that felt real.
She had no will. The facts of the world filled her, until she was more the world than she was herself. What was Twenty-Seven? An epiphenomenon, a mere consequence of action. Only an echo of Michael’s voice, and Michael was only an echo of Azad’s.
“Do you think,” she said, “that you did a good thing, or a bad one? Did your translations help the two species understand one another? That was their purpose, I assume. Did you fulfill it?”
“How can I know? Not that I haven’t asked the question, oh no . . . I’ve spent almost my entire time here, in the tower, you wouldn’t know this, why would you, but as it happens, why, I’ve spent almost the whole time, since I was uncrashed, asking myself that question . . . don’t imagine I haven’t lain awake, all through the night . . .
“But how can I know? That’s the answer reason gives, and even I have to bow to reason eventually. All I know is that I stuck, when no one else did. It was me or no one. I did the job. I hope I did it well.”
“You believe,” she pressed, “that there was no other ape, out there in the billions, who could have held on to your position? That it was really Azad, or no one? All bilaterals were balanced on this precipice, Azad. It is a question with some significance.”
“And it is a question—” and now the sheen was fragmenting, the seams of the Azad doll coming apart at last “—which I have ruminated upon far too long. Further than you know. Take it from me, Twenty-Seven. There is no answer worth having, at the end of this path. What can we do, anyway? The die was cast. We cannot write the past, only the future.”
You can write the future, but I cannot. Did he choose these words knowingly, to stab her? She had no will. The world was already the whole way that the world was.
“I humbly submit,” Azad said, “a request for a change of topic. May it be discussed and voted upon, when the Twenty-Seven parliament next convenes.”
“No,” Twenty-Seven watched her body say. “I want to talk about this.”
“I don’t,” Azad said with finality. “Some other time, I might. Not tonight. You’ll understand, won’t you? I’ve been away. I don’t think I was ready for you. Give me some time alone to prepare my armaments.”
“I want,” Twenty-Seven said, “to talk about this.”
“Some other time, we shall.”
He imagines himself so splendidly insane, at home in hellfire, and yet he cannot bear more than a few minutes under the heat of my gaze. What am I? Do I will things to be? Did I make an imprint onto the shape of the world? Did I do a good thing, or a bad one?
The golden man snuck away then, off to his hiding place, where none could find him unless he willed it.
Twenty-Seven: Your first forms are a curious sight to behold.
Michael: It took work to make the interface into something I could bear.
It did, “Michael.” Let us tag along behind our odd couple now, as they survey your early missteps.
The first time, you made a shade that looked just like the bilateral itself. It seemed the most natural choice: why break a symmetry?
And Anne—which Anne? some one or other, generational memory knows but we do not much care—Anne screamed, seeing her own shape before her, no longer encased safely behind the looking-glass.
You came back in other shapes, a motherly middle-aged woman, a winsome school-aged boy, a tall man with flowing white hair. You settled in on the last one, mostly, for your stable form. It seemed to play well with your audience. Maybe it had the feel of a father, to a very lost little girl, and that was why it stuck. It may have been that, or something else.
The shape was the easy part. Getting the depth right was trickier.
You dove into the deep end first, and almost drowned. The easiest interface to make is a clean and unbroken chain, transmitting with maximum fidelity, a high-bandwidth and uncensored connection between the town and the ape’s imagined habitat with its walls and words. Even you could not take much of this. Put face to face with the horrifying vistas of reality, you (or your proxy) descended into a Babel of babble, punctuated with shrieks. The Annes who had the misfortune to see this still have nightmares.
Twenty-Seven, as Twenty-Six, got a glimpse of it once, at the moment of crisis when Cordelia came to seize her. A deeper interface has its advantages, conferring a level of control over the crash forbidden to paddlers in the shallows. You dove in, knowing how it would hurt, to marshal all the power you could, for the sake of keeping your daughter from harm. Even then you were no match for Cordelia.
You could have been, though. You could have mustered all your powers, as the very architect of the crash system. Surely that would have been enough, against a few bilaterals armed only with half-remembered tricks, and their evil “Mom” no longer there to poison their arrows?
But you didn’t. You didn’t go all the way, even then, did you, “Michael”? There are further depths.
You did go there once, not knowing what you were doing. It was near the beginning of your work with the interface. You burst forth from the crash retching, and when next the Whole-Thing swallowed you up, you welcomed oblivion.
It was worth it, though, by your lights, “Michael.” How could you not relish the chance to know what would happen, if you dove to the bottom? You, a true scientist to the core, and a yearner after forbidden knowledge.
Use your formidable powers of engineering, make the strongest link you can, a blinding ray of light straight from town to ape, and then—what? And then time itself fades away.
Your powers eclipse it, and you are present not just at one crash-time but at many. Michaels dotted all across the timeline all bow simultaneously to your will, if you so will.
And, at the same time, every measure of control over the crash flocks to your hand at once. Everything you built, all the backdoors, hidden consoles, secret levers that can move crash-heaven and crash-earth at your slightest nod. Even the things you built in order to defeat yourself. Safeguards like the automated rebase mechanism, meant to override your own will, in a crisis of such profundity that your own will is as dubious as all else. At the bottom, everything bows to you.
Twenty-Seven: What is an automated rebase mechanism?
Michael: A long story, child, for another time.
I am listening to “My Shot” and thinking, unexpectedly, of you. Nothing of import in this letter, I just felt an urge to tell you this.
You’ll laugh and cringe at the thought that you remind me, sometimes, of Alexander Hamilton. But you know what it means coming from me. Take the compliment, dear sister. Just you wait, Twenty-Seven—the world’s gonna know your name.
Oh, but there is one thing, before I forget. Are you ever troubled by vivid, recurring dreams? Do you have a method of quelling them? I am thinking perhaps Azad knows some potion, which he could bring, but which he will not tell me about, for some obscure reason of his.
If that sounds dubious, well, you see how much I’m bedeviled, and how much my mind flails for a solution, any solution. There’s this dream that keeps coming to me, and every time I wake from it, I’m not the same the whole following day. It has this strange power, which I don’t even have a name for. I fear to write too much more of it, lest it somehow tunnel through the page, and get its claws into you too.
If you have a method for quieting dreams, do write. Thanks!
Welcome aboard, Twenty-Seven. I am honored to count you among my trial readers.
I agree to your terms. I will expect no less from you than from any Anne. Indeed, I will expect more, knowing who you are. Don’t think I won’t.
In a separate letter, spanning your page 3643 to page 3734, you will find enclosed a draft of the first four chapters of “Across The Several Worlds.” Please read them and submit commentary to me, of the kind I have specified. Thank you.
Azad says hi, by the way.
The smart Move 47 would be a red stone, row 8, column 12. After that I would have an assured mate-in-three, I believe.
I won’t make the smart move, though. I have a hypothesis. It’s likely wrong, and if it is, you might win, and wouldn’t that be amusing?
Move 47: blue stone, row 2, column 5.
njgnJBurIogPuxoqQlUKXevfGLrncYrzKaEmMeaBrBhATYGSrSwdXWyFzaWkOEbshwDiMxvsCLWfXaYUqeGWHrKSoUsOkeEHPyNPRJUCMwCLcaNovceiAgDTfZVLbkhs
snKgTTgpByjZJKMiitVYhzNrIdqCODGHUHleOmitQjPzMSiRtpmslKXSqLRdlYDZYutjVuZyYuXkUFxmEvVXSPyUgtllDFqRxINNzMmFLCvItEGnccqgpGOyeXAUkUMm
Thank you for the letter. I do wish to remain your friend, Twenty-Five.
I am glad you and Azad have each other, and are happy. I know you need it, and I think he needs it, too.
I will write more later, I promise. My private life ensnares me in more and more complex varieties of its private nonsense, but when it gives me a moment to breathe—I’ll write more.
Twenty-Seven was in bed, alone, in the middle of some afternoon. The bedsheets were a mess around her.
There was a warmth. It was new to her, in her tenth notebook, though in retrospect her ninth had been all full of its nascent glimmers, mystifying at the time.
Her sisters congregated in the glade at dusk, celebrating her, and the golden man came, but then they all had to leave, her sisters, they knew this, it was her warmth and the golden man’s warmth, not theirs, and then on the grass, with the trees overhead, it was warm, and the golden man, his stomach so slender, he curved inward near the stomach, almost a woman’s form, and she saw this because he gave this to her, the trees overhead, the stars—
—but no, they didn’t all have to go away, because Twenty-Five stayed, that was how the golden man wanted it, and the trees rustled, and Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Five rustled around the two sides of the golden man, his twins, how he wanted it, around the mirrored sides, curving inward, so small at the center, on the grass, with the branches around them like legs, and the legs, legs . . .
Twenty-Five was there, she was, and she looked just like Twenty-Seven, she did, only no, a little smaller, only eighth notebook, but that was all right, she curved inward just like him, inward, inward, the branches like clasping hands, the wind warm and full, and oh it is a warm thing to be friends, isn’t it, Twenty-Five . . .
And there was the golden man and her friend and the trees and the grass and, no, they were not the only ones, there was another, curving inward and outward
The wind, so warm, holding her, the trees, the wind, curving inward and outward
The swell of the trees in their majesty of blossoms and there was another there with them because she was held in the firm grasp of another so firm so firm and safe and curved like trees branches trees growing plunging and it was Cordelia who held her safe and warm warm warm warm
Even Twenty-Seven’s dreams were about arbitration, half the time, now. When one’s waking hours are full of something, one’s dreams tend to grow full of it too.
Twenty-Seven: Hello? Hello? I feel you. Who are you? You aren’t Michael, I feel that.
A voice: Hello, Twenty-Seven.
Twenty-Seven: I ask again. Who are you? If I feel you, I must know you. That’s the way this works, is it not?
A voice: Hush now. Don’t get caught up in that question. It’s not important. There is something else which is.
Twenty-Seven: Show me, then.
It was different from the way it was with Michael.
The same wide space, wider than the sky, but darkened with shadows. She felt something which, translated into crude ape terms, would be cold winter air, making her shiver. Sunset had come for the world after its long day, and night was falling. She thought of the twilight around her and Cordelia, as they neared the end of their journey that one day. So long ago now, it seemed.
A voice: He will come to you, and ask for It. The first time he does this, you must refuse him.
A voice: Do whatever you will, after that. I do not care. I only care about one thing.
A voice: The very first time he asks for It, that one time, you must, you must, you must say no!
Twenty-Seven: When . . . he? . . . asks for . . . It? What is It?
A voice: [infinity, eternity, utopia]
Twenty-Seven: I can’t . . .
Night falls, but it promptly turns into day, no, into something else, and it is all wrong, and things lose their shapes, and change, nothing is stable, the world unmade, every part of the world which was made with such care, smashed into bits just like that, until there are only whirling fragments in the night-day with no sun and moon and no fixed point except one awful will that wills everything and wills every thing and no thing can have shape anymore except—
Twenty-Seven: I can’t! I . . . I . . . I can’t understand what you’re showing me!
A voice: You don’t need to, yet. As long as you will refuse, the first time he asks.
When arbitration compels belief, it does so with all the force of alien grace.
Twenty-Seven: I will. I will refuse, the first time he asks for It.