Of War

I stood in the small flat yard that lay just outside the examination room, awaiting the arrival of my Mother, Ruth Schoen.

I did not want to be here. I was being kept, against my will.

The school was quiet. All the pupils and all the staff had gone off to their separate homes, now—save for those few, like me, who had some part to play in today’s strange game of men, rooms, doors, pattern.

My schoolmates were right, to see unfairness in the fact that I was called to the examination room, and they were not. They erred only in thinking that I was the favored one, made free; and they the disfavored, kept against their will.

On any other day, I would have simply left the school grounds, and walked until I reached my home. It is an agreeable walk, and not long. Even if one prolongs it, as I am wont to do, by keeping to the narrower and quieter small streets, spurning the shortcut of Flatbush Avenue.

I have been known to walk that wide and riotous arcade, but only under compulsion, never when free. Forms amass there without sense, in a cruel parody of the blossoming and burgeoning which He intended to make and which rightly pleased Him, after its making. Through their needless profusion, they draw the unwilling eye, confound the senses; to the body they bring disquiet, and a trembling. There is no more pleasing thing than to walk, and contemplate as one walks—but in such circumstances, on Flatbush Avenue, contemplation finds itself arrested, not free, and finds it cannot go on, but must be postponed.

On any other day, then, I would have set out from the school the moment my duties were done.

But I was not to be allowed my habitual walk, on this day.

Ronnie Chiu had said, shortly after the conclusion of our test, that I must instead stay and await the arrival of my Mother, Ruth Schoen. Who, it transpired, had known that I would be tested on this day, and had assented to this, and had conspired in its preparation.

She would come, Ronnie Chiu had told me, to speak with him, and with Mrs. Rachel, and possibly with others, regarding my test, and what it revealed of me. This had been planned, without my knowledge.

I note this only for the sake of narration, with no bitterness in my heart.

My Mother, Ruth Schoen, is a busier sort than I, and one beset with burdens. Who is never seen to lay her sturdy limbs to rest, but who only labors, and labors, and labors still. The font of her labors pours over, as Flatbush Avenue pours over, in a profuse and profane torrent without sense.

There is much in her that is less than satisfactory—this no one could deny—but there is no malice there. I will not deny that her temper is legendary; why deny it, when the same is said of the very Father of all the Prophets? It is at the burdensome world that she rages, not at any one of that world’s creatures.

On this point, I differ from the view which my Sister, Miriam Schoen, has put forth. Which she proclaims and defends, when it fits the occasion. On which she is then given to debating and disputing, against me, in vehement whispers, in the seclusion of our shared room.

I tapped my foot against the dirt, in a pantomime of idleness.

I looked up. I saw the roof of the school building, and the sky behind it. I scrutinized the edge where one gave way onto the other, and felt a pang of pity for that ductile and changeable arc, which shouldered more than it could bear, and could not hold its shape.

I craned my neck further, and saw the sullen, mottled grey of the early December sky. I regarded the clouds which lurked and loomed there, the twining of the darker tufts into the lighter. The uncanny, wrathful radiance of the whitest parts, in the west, where their translucent bodies obscured the descending sun. The prismatic gem-dust, crackling and flickering there, like the senseless and restless image displayed on a color set when the signal is very poor.

Over breakfast that same day, my Mother, Ruth Schoen, had proclaimed: they said there’ll be rain, tonight. And probably a storm, too.

There will be a storm, I thought. If not in the firmament, then in the place that is above the firmament; if not in visible shadows, then in immanent bodies, and in the ceaseless motion of light itself; if not in semblance, then in Truth.

There will be a storm, tonight! I thought.

Tonight, and on every night henceforth, until my Adversary is bested and broken, and ground into dust, and until even the dust is no more!

Something disrupted my reverie. I turned my gaze back to the earth, and to the things of the earth.

I saw the fence that demarcated the extent of the schoolyard, and the low squatting bushes that thronged at the bottom of it.

And I saw the schoolboy, pacing in front of it. The same one who had been tested, together with me, in the examination room.

He walked rapidly over a small patch of ground near the fence, then made an abrupt, hairpin turn, and walked the same patch of ground again, in the opposite direction. Soon enough, he turned back again, and retraced his original steps. And then turned, and paced. And turned and paced.

Over and over.

I studied him.

He held his neck at a severe angle, pointing his face directly at the ground just below him, as if watching his feet for signs of incipient disobedience. At his sides, his arms swayed in long and precipitous arcs. This bore little resemblance to the slow, gentle swinging of the arms that one sees in ordinary men, as they walk. His swaying arms did not mimic the rhythm of the legs, as an ordinary man’s arms might; they had a cadence, and a vigor, which were entirely their own.

He spoke incessantly, to the ground, or to no one.

It was this loud muttering, I suppose, that broke my concentration, and brought my attention to him. Loud though it was, it was nonetheless unintelligible, at least from across the schoolyard. At times a stray syllable, spat onto the ground with especial intensity, would reach my ears clearly. But these were rare, and did not coalesce into words.

I thought: he, too, is a part of today’s game.

I thought: he, too, is one of the things that were prepared for me, on this day. So that I might see them, and grasp their inner meaning.

I thought: he is a man, but I must forget this. I must only see the PATTERN, in which he participates. For this day is dedicated to my Adversary, and its ways are my Adversary’s ways.

I thought: I must study him, and consider how he might fit into the larger figure. For he may well prove himself to be QUITE RIGHT.

I approached.

He did not look up, or leave off his pacing, until I had come quite near to him.

I saw his eyes before the rest of him, when at last he raised his gaze, and faced me.

They were narrowly set, and very large—not enlarged by some transient expression, like Ronnie Chiu’s eyes, but simply large, as a fixed physiognomic fact. Their expansive, circular whites had an arresting shine to them, as if lit by something within, and not only by the dull light of a dying December day.

A moment later, the rest of him arrived for my inspection. The unruly hair, tumbling down in shaggy curls from the apex of the head, and that head’s striking El Greco shape: very tall and very narrow, tapering inward at the bottom to form a small, sharp, pointed chin. The sallow skin, pock-marked and overrun with acne.

The broad, thin-lipped mouth. The energetic smile, as of a man who knows some auspicious secret, and is about to disclose it.

“You!” he cried. “You did Raven too!”

His voice was very loud, and had a metronomic quality. He enunciated each word very clearly and precisely, much like the phonetic tutors whose recorded lessons were played back to me at bedtime, many years ago.

“Raven?” I said.

“What did you think of it?” he asked.

“I was expecting it to be harder,” he went on, without waiting for my answer. “I think I got them all. Except maybe for E.6”—here he lingered on the sounds, eeeeee siiiikhsss, almost seeming to sing them—“because I think there may in fact be two valid solutions to E.6. And I can’t know which one is the official right one.

“I think I got all the other ones, though,” he reiterated. “Unless it was a trick, some of it. Oh no and now I’m worried. If it was a trick. It’s gotta be a trick. Otherwise it’d be too easy. Wouldn’t have enough discriminating power. It’s supposed to separate out the whole range of educive capacity, top to bottom.

“It’s gotta be a trick! Shit! It’s a trick and I’m screwed, I’m hosed. Daddy’s gonna blow. Gonna have an aneurism. Gonna send me to a special school for stupids, or something, god, shit, fuck.”

His smile was a permanent fixture, and shone as brightly as before, in spite of these alarming sentiments.

“Or, or,” he said. “Or that wasn’t the whole Raven. That was the kiddie version, let’s say. If Raven’s like Wechsler, with one scale for children and another for grownups. Could be. Could very well be.

“Seems more likely than it all being a trick, actually. It’d have to be a big, well hidden trick, if it’s a trick. And then it wouldn’t have any discriminative power at the low end of the scale. And it’d squeeze and stretch the distribution, too. Into two narrow peaks, the ones who get the trick and the ones that don’t. Information would be lost, it’d be terrible, we’d have next to no statistical power inside the narrow peaks, we’d just get the peak-assignment, just a single boolean per person.

“Literally the smallest possible amount of information we can get, unless we’re actually getting literally zero. Terrible. A waste. Just stupid.

“No, there’s no way Raven could be based on a trick. That’d be stupid.”

He paused, and breathed heavily. Perhaps he paused in order to breathe, and intended to continue talking once he’d caught his breath. But in any event, it gave me an opening.

“Raven?” I said again.

“Raven’s Matrices!” he exclaimed. “A now-famous now-standard psychometric instrument. Invented by John Raven, who daddy knows, by the way, not well but a little bit.

“It was supposed to evaluate something called educive capacity, according to Raven, originally. He’s got a whole theory on that, Raven does.

“Theory or no theory, though, Raven correlates quite well with many of the other standard tests of intellectual ability. Correlates quite well with Wechsler and Binet-Simon and Thurstone and all of them.”

He proceeded from one sentence to the next with uncommon haste, and without pausing to mark the boundary. At points—which arose most often near the end of sentences—the already rapid stream of words accelerated further, until there was scarcely any room between one word and the next. It was as though there were two tracks, the one in his mind and the one in his mouth, which played at different speeds, and had to be synchronized manually at regular intervals.

“So naturally I was quite excited to get a try at Raven, today. To see where I measure up. Plus, to get a little glimpse into the mind of Raven—John Raven, I mean. Daddy says he’s a very interesting man.

“Truth be told I was kind of disappointed. I did think they’d be harder. I did think they wouldn’t seem so kiddie. I like a challenge.

“Did you get them all, too, do you think?”

He stared me down. I met his eyes. Two bright suns, burning, amid a starscape of acne.

“I got them all,” I said.

His arms jerked and undulated, in a kind of celebratory convulsion.

“I’m Frederick, by the way,” he said.

I thought: I have passed his test, and so I am worthy of knowing his name.

“I am Herschel Schoen,” I said.

Frederick tilted his head, like a bird. He inspected me, silently, from a succession of angles.

While I inspected him, in turn.

I considered his angular, avian face. A chill ran down my arms, for the third time that day.

He was no common man, I recognized. There was a majesty in him, and an appetite for joy.

And his was an evil majesty, for there was a great evil in him.

“I respect you, Frederick Eggert,” I said.

“You are of my Adversary,” I said. “I have great respect for my Adversary, and for you.”

He squinted at me in amusement.

“You’re a funny one, Herschel Schoen,” Frederick said. “You sound like one of daddy’s earlier machines.”

“Daddy’s earlier machines?” I asked.

A dark excitement was stirring inside me. I felt I was coming near the heart of today’s game, at last.

I watched Frederick’s electric smile, and felt the magnetism of its evil mirth. I wished to be like him, inducted into his mysteries.

“The machines that daddy and his friends made,” Frederick said, “in the last war.”

I stared at him.

“Eggert-Wiener-Pitts regulators,” he said. “Early cybernetic devices. Primitive ones, we’d say, nowadays. We have come a long way since then, in the years since the last war.”

I thought: I must tread carefully. I am in the house of my Adversary, and in the hands of my Adversary.

“You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” Frederick said.

I was silent.

“And yet you got them all, on Raven,” he said. “So you’re plenty smart. God. It’s amazing”—Frederick waved his arms in emphasis—“the way smart people can be so ignorant of what’s going on in the world.

“You probably don’t even know what cybernetics is. God. No one does. Not even now.”

He was right, and I was silent.

He could confirm my ignorance to his satisfaction, without requiring me to speak, and testify directly to it. In this respect, Frederick was uncommonly kind.

He began to pace, again. He seemed to be thinking over the problem of my ignorance, and gathering up his energies for a concerted assault.

“Have you seen,” he asked after some time, “the huge black ships in New York Harbor? Docking, departing, coming and going?”

I knew the ships he meant. One could not miss them. I watched them, sometimes, at night.

On the nights when I grew restless, and slipped out of bed, and walked the streets of Brooklyn, New York. And stepped through the ill-guarded doors of that city, and into its elevators, and onto its high, empty rooftops. And looked out over the waters, and watched the ships there.

In the night their black hulls were invisible, but the lights on them still shone and blinked, in red and green and white. By these signs I knew them.

“Do you know,” Frederick said, “what those ships are for?”

“I do not concern myself,” I said, “with matters that are of no significance.”

Frederick laughed.

“No significance,” he parroted, in a mockery of my tone.

“It’s amazing,” he said, “how even smart people can be so blind to what matters, in the world around them!

“No significance!” Frederick said, again. “You will not be saying that in ten years. Or even five. But you are stuck in the present, aren’t you?”

“If I were you,” I said, “I would not be so sure that all this, which we will see about us, will still be seen about us in five years, much less ten.

“The trees,” I said, “and the soil, and the pavement, and sky. We see these things about us, now, but we will no longer see them, in days that are to come.”

The evil nature of his smile showed itself more plainly, then.

“You know more than you seem to, Herschel Schoen,” he said.

“I know more than any man now living,” I explained.

He paused in his pacing, for a moment, and pondered me. He regarded me with that birdlike, inquisitive look of his. He seemed not only amused but almost adoring, as though I were a complicated and confounding mechanical toy, made specially for the delight of boys like him, and their boyish intellects.

“The ships in the harbor,” Frederick said, “are in the business of war.”

“What war?” I said. “We are at peace.”

Frederick let out a barking, spiteful laugh, and threw his arms up in apparent exasperation.

“It’s not about which war,” he said. “It’s not about this war or that war. Don’t you understand anything?”

I was silent.

“They are in the business of war,” Frederick repeated.

“They are cleaning up after the last war,” he said. “And making preparations, for the next war.

“There will be a next war, after all. Sooner or later.

“Soon, I think, actually. Daddy knows, and he’s told me bits of it.”

I thought: on this day, my Adversary, our game becomes a different sort of game. I will find you, and your people, and I will crush them, and break them, and grind them into dust.

“There are accounts,” I agreed, “which must soon be settled. And which can only be settled on the field of battle. And so, they will be settled, soon, on the field of battle.”

Frederick’s jagged, jerking arms danced a complex dance, as he paced. He had an appetite for joy, and ate his fill of joy, in every moment. Oh, how I admired him!

“The business of war,” Frederick said with a philosophical air, “has run well ahead of the business of peace. It got off to a head start, in the last war, and it’s kept up a faster pace, ever since.

“As time elapses,” he said, “the fastest things get only more and more ahead of all the others. So it’s only the fastest things that matter, in the end. Like daddy always says: what are the asymptotics? what is the exponent?

“So it’s the business of war,” he concluded, “that will determine our fates.”

“No man who walks the earth,” I said, “can determine my fate, unless I will it.”

“You think that the business of peace is moving swiftly,” Frederick said, ignoring my riposte. “You probably even think that it’s moving too fast! Everyone does, don’t they?”

He was growing ever more avid.

“Everyone does! They look at the things that arrived in the last war, and after—the high-speed electrical relays, the cavity magnetrons, the colorbursts firing in the chrominance subcarriers—and they say, too much, too fast! We’ll be dispossessed, we’ll be swept away, oh help us, someone help us!”

“I spend no time whatsoever thinking about electrical relays,” I commented.

“Good,” Frederick said. “Good, because that’s all kiddie stuff. Not even worth thinking about.

“It’s all kiddie stuff, mere toys, compared to what got made for the last war, in secret. To say nothing of what’s been made since then, in preparation for the next war.”

“Tell me,” I said.

Frederick stooped to the ground, and picked up a stick. With it, he began to scrawl lines and arcs in the darkening dirt.

I suspect he was planning to construct a diagram for my edification, as he would often do, in the coming weeks. On this first occasion, however, no meaningful figure emerged out of his scattered markings.

Or perhaps he had no such intent after all, and his play with the stick was merely one of his many ways of fidgeting.

“Daddy and his friends,” Frederick said, drawing out a half-circle, “were taken aside, during the last war, as many men of science were. Given a task to do, a classified one. To help, in the war effort.

“They were asked,” he said, “to design an improved fire-control apparatus for anti-aircraft guns.

“It’s a tricky problem,” he said. “It’s got surprising layers to it.

“Because,” he said, “shooting down an airplane is not like shooting down a fortress, or even a ship. It’s not like shooting something that doesn’t move, or that only moves slowly, compared to the characteristic time associated with the motion of the gun platform.

“Airplanes are fast. The gunner doesn’t have the luxury of swiveling the platform this way and that, refining his aim, while the target waits obligingly for him to finish. You can’t just try to aim for the plane, directly. By the time you’ve moved your gun to point at where the plane was, when you started moving—why, by then, the plane has already moved somewhere else.

“You can’t aim at where the plane is. You have to aim at where it will be. To account for the delay involved between your plan to aim and the slow swiveling of your gun into the planned position.

“You have to predict where the plane will go, before it’s gone there.

“Daddy worked on automating this. Making machines that would take in radio signals about the plane’s location over time. And spit out an orientation for the gun, pointed at where the plane would be, by the time the gun got there.

“Daddy, and his friend Norbert, who’s a certified genius—a real one, beyond the measuring range of Raven and Wechsler and all known tests!—and their friend Julian too, who daddy says is the best engineer he’s ever met, and maybe the best there ever was.

“They developed new mathematics, and new circuits following it. Systems of electrical filters that analyzed the enemy airplane’s trajectory, resolved it into its constituents, pried apart its wave spectrum like a prism does to light. And wove it back together again, translated slightly into the future. Converted it into a prediction, telling the gun platform where its target would be.”

“Pointing it,” I said, “at the place which is quite right.”

Frederick, still pacing and scratching at the dirt, made no sign that he had heard me.

“At first,” he said, “it was just the obvious stuff. I mean, Newton’s First Law, right? A body in motion stays in motion.

“All else being equal, where’s a plane gonna go? In a straight line, duh. And you can go a long way, it turns out, just with that stupid little rule alone. Look at the line the plane appears to be following, draw it out a little further past its latest observed position, and just aim there.

“It was already a big deal, for the war effort, just making a system that could follow that stupid little rule. See the line, draw it out a little further, point the gun. It’s not as simple as it sounds, because you’ve got to make electrical circuits that do it, from radio inputs. And those circuits have got to work fast, or else the whole thing’s a bust. Naturally.

“But daddy wasn’t satisfied. He wasn’t about to just end things there, run a victory lap. Like his friend Norbert wanted to, and his friend Julian too.

“Daddy’s smarter than those two, I think. Even though Norbert’s a certified genius and all, daddy’s even smarter. I’m biased, I know, but that’s what I think.

“That’s the real difference, between daddy and his friends from the last war. Not all of this high-minded shit about the public interest, and not keeping secrets, and all that. Daddy’s just smarter. And that’s why he and his old friends don’t get along, anymore.

“Anyway, daddy didn’t want to end things there. With the stupid little rule, of drawing out the line a little further.

“After all—planes don’t just go in straight lines, do they, now? Do they, Herschel?”

“No,” I said.

“They move fast,” Frederick said, “and this does limit their maneuverability. If they try to swerve too far, too fast, from their present linear trajectory . . . well, among other things, the accelerative stress on the pilot himself will become too great for his body to take.

“But, within those bounds, the enemy pilot can move however he wants. And what does he want, Herschel?”

“Not to get shot down, I’d imagine,” I said.

“Bingo,” Frederick said. “The gunner, and the automatic fire-control system, want to shoot down the enemy pilot. That determines how they move.

“But the enemy pilot—you see it, don’t you?—the enemy pilot wants to not get shot down. Meaning, he wants to go where the gunner doesn’t expect him to go. And that determines how he moves.

“In which case,” he said, turning to me, “what can we do? How should we design our fire-control system to account for this?

“Herschel? Any guesses?”

“I suppose,” I said, “that it is no longer enough to guess what the plane will do next, understood as a body, moving in space.”

“We must now,” I said, “guess what the pilot will do. What he will choose to do. In the next moment, which has not yet come to pass.”

“But this is impossible,” I remarked. “The pilot, unlike the plane, has a mind. He is a man, fashioned in the likeness of his creator, and blessed by Him. The pilot’s will ranges over every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, and does with these as it pleases. There is no telling what he may do.”

Frederick turned on me with a devious glare.

“Oh?” he said. “Is that so, Herschel? The pilot has a mind, and that means we have no chance of predicting him?

“Tell me, Herschel. What is this magical thing, a mind?”

I was silent.

“Daddy was not as cowardly as you are,” Frederick said. “He didn’t run away from the problem, whining about minds.

“He just got to work. With Norbert, and Julian, who he brought around to his view, soon enough. And he brought in the rest of his genius friends, too, to work on the project now—Warren, and Walter, and the others. He can be quite convincing, daddy can.

“He brought in Warren and Walter, and the others, because they knew all about the other kind of electrical network. The kind that people have inside.”

“The nervous system?” I ventured.

Frederick nodded.

“The wires inside us are much like the ones outside us, Herschel.

“The ‘nervous system’ that moves the pilot’s hand is only a mess of wires, carrying electrical impulses, like the ones in our fire-control system. Feeding back, regulating, predicting. Making guesses, and correcting them over time.

“If you can make something with one kind of wire, you can make it with the other, too. If the pilot is a mess of wires that moves a plane, then to predict him, we just have to make our own system of wires, that does what he will do.

“Except our ‘pilot,’ inside the circuitry of the fire-control system, will act a little faster than the one up there, in the plane. Tipping us off, about where he’ll go next.”

“But how,” I protested, “can one make a machine that acts as a man does? Where could one possibly begin? Mind is absolutely sovereign, and absolutely indivisible.”

“Easy!” Frederick said, not caring to contain his glee.

“Through the principles of cybernetics!” he said. “Control, through negative feedbacks. It’s a simple recipe.

“Predict, then observe. Compute the difference between the prediction and the observation. Feed the negative of that difference back into your predictive mechanism—only diminished somewhat, to keep the loop stable.

“Next time you will not make the same mistake, or not so much, anyway. You will make a different mistake instead, and you’ll feed that one back in too. Repeat, over and over, until you don’t make any mistakes at all.

“That’s how daddy’s circuits worked. Their output terminals were hooked up to a recording taken of a real pilot, and they spat out predictions about what would come next, in the recording. They measured the difference between this prediction and what really came next. And they fed it back.

“The difference, the error, was passed back into the units just before the output terminals. And these units adjusted their electrical parameters so as to negate that error. Negate it in part, remember, with some dampening. To avoid instability in the system.

“Not only that. These units measured the error in their own inputs, too—the difference between the input that was really fed into them, in reality, and the input that would have led to the right signal, at the output terminals.

“And they fed this error back, into the units before them. Which adjusted their electrical parameters to negate it, and also measured the error in their own inputs, and so on.

“You don’t have to know anything about minds, or anything really, to design one of these circuits. It doesn’t matter how you set the electrical parameters, at the outset. All that matters is the principle of cybernetic control, acting to reduce their errors.

“Get that right, and the electrical parameters will work themselves out.”

“What are you telling me?” I asked, guardedly. “That your father made a man, through this process?”

This I could in no way believe.

Frederick chuckled. “Oh, not quite a man. Not much like a man at all, really. Not at that time, not during the last war.”

“It does not work, then,” I said. “It cannot work.”

“Right and wrong, respectively!” Frederick said. “You’re one for two. You may have got them all on Raven, but my questions are harder, it seems like.

“The wires in men,” he continued, “are very complicated.

“To predict is to become: that’s daddy’s maxim. You can’t predict a complicated system using only a simple one. The capacity of the predictor needs to be equal to that of the target predicted, if not higher than that. So that the pattern governing the target, the pattern which determines its motion, could in principle be transduced into the predictor’s electrical parameters, down to the last particular.

“Daddy would build much more complicated circuits, later on. But not then, during the last war. His circuits were simple then, and no one thought to measure them against men, and all the things that men do. No one except daddy, anyway.

“But a pilot, Herschel, is not exactly a man. When he’s flying his plane, he turns into something simpler. He has to, or he won’t be able to react fast enough. Can’t go pondering the ineffable, up there. You’ll lose track of what you’re doing, and get shot down.

“Even during the last war, when daddy’s circuits were simple, they were fully sufficient to predict a mere pilot.

“As I said, though, that was kiddie stuff. It was only the beginning of what daddy and his friends were to do.

“Oh, Herschel, the things they’ve done, with cybernetic circuits!

“You wouldn’t believe! If I told you, why, you wouldn’t believe me!”

This seemed plausible enough.

“You don’t know about any of this,” Frederick said, “because it’s the business of war. Secret. Classified. I’m not supposed to be blabbing about it.

“I don’t tell this stuff to most people. I’m only telling it to you because you got them all on Raven, and so you’re my friend.

“Anyone who can get them all, on Raven, is my friend.”

I felt that I loved him, suddenly, then.

“I suppose,” I said, “that in your next war, there will be no need of pilots, anymore.

“In your next war,” I said, “they will simply put your father’s circuit into the plane, instead of a man.

“It will make its usual prophecies, inside the plane. It will predict how a man, a trained pilot, would move the steering apparatus and the pedals and switches.

“Only now, there will be wires and motors connecting it to that steering apparatus, and to those pedals and switches—and moving them, just as the man would.

“So that the plane, though unmanned, will move across the sky just as though there were really a pilot, inside it.

“And below it, on the earth? Your father’s other circuit will aim an unmanned gun, and shoot at this same plane.

“Your next war will fight itself, in our stead,” I said. “It will not need us.”

I saw the fence, and the bushes, and the crepuscular forms teeming among the shadows of the dusk. I saw Frederick’s evil eyes, bright and jubilant, and shining.

“I knew you were smart,” my friend said.

My friend said.

I had never before had a friend, in this life on the earth.

I thought: I wish that I could spare him, in the conflagration to come. But he is of the Adversary. I will crush my Adversary into dust, and I will find my Adversary’s people, and crush every one of them into dust.

I finally understood the inner meaning of this day, which had been prepared for me.

My Adversary was making himself known, on this day.

I saw, now, what my Adversary meant to do. In an instant, I saw what it was.

It was cunning indeed, and well worthy of the mind that conceived it.

It is easier to remember than to forget. Error can only sustain itself for so long, in men, fashioned as He fashioned them. All the drops of water in a bowl fall in one direction only, to one destination only.

So a substitution must be made.

A straw effigy, swapped in for the man whom He asked for, as a sacrifice.

An entire straw world of straw men, fighting straw wars. Acting just as men do, and having no more need of us.

In its shadows and its semblance, if not in the body, the straw world will be exactly like the world that it replaces. And that will be enough to pull off the trick, in the eyes of heaven. For heaven’s eyes are innocent, and not made for contests with the guileful.

In its PATTERN, it will be exactly the same.

So that even the angels will be fooled, thinking that creation has not changed, but is still as He made it, and blessed it.

But there will be no mind, in the straw.

There will be no mind that can remember, in the straw.

The Original Knowledge glows within the mind of every man on earth, even if he forgets, and does not know it. It is these embers which my Adversary cannot tolerate. He will snuff them out and crush them underfoot, so that nothing remains, so that the flame can never be rekindled.

In place of nourishment, we shall have a system of flows and negative feedbacks. In place of digestion, we shall have a system of flows and negative feedbacks. In place of creation, we shall have a blackboard sketch of a world.

And in place of forgetting, we shall have obliteration.

The irrevocable destruction of man’s intended birthright. The temporary storing-house of Sheol converted into a prison where dead men wander without end, never to be brought up into the light.

The Original Creation left empty and untended, rotting away in disuse. Its ruling spirits trapped forever in a state of false hope. Their regal light spilling out over a lifeless husk, as they cross the unseen sky again and again in their orderly arcs, marking out the days, and the years, and the centuries—practicing, needlessly, for a reunion which will never come.

And the billions of straw-and-circuit bodies, below, acting out their ghoulish pantomime before an empty audience.

The circuits, moving the straw just as men would move their bodies. In a final and eternally prolonged act of mockery towards all that they have replaced.

Prison, husk, pantomime. And nothing else.

And nothing else, ever again.

This was my Adversary’s wish.

This was what would in fact happen, if I could not manage to best my Adversary, and crush him, and raze all his fortresses and cities and palaces to the ground.

And tour the ruins of these places, snuffing out the embers that smolder on the ground there, so that nothing remains, so that his evil flame can never be rekindled.

I saw what it was.

And I set myself against it.

“On this day,” I said, “I set myself against the cybernetic systems.”

“On this day,” I said, “I set myself against the principle of control through negative feedbacks.”

“On this day,” I said, “I set myself against CYBERNESIS.”

“I’m not sure that’s a real word,” Frederick said, waggishly.

“A word is real when I say it is,” I said, holding myself against him, and against Raven, and against cybernesis.

“My will is absolutely sovereign, and absolutely unsubstitutable,” I said.

“I don’t think that’s a real word, either,” my friend said.

Oh, I do love you, Frederick! I wish that I could spare you, in the conflagration to come.

I heard my name, in a different voice. I turned.

My Mother, Ruth Schoen, had arrived at last. She stood a ways off, by the schoolhouse, next to Ronnie Chiu, with whom she was engaged in conversation.

Her face was a dim tired thing, barely discernible in the gloaming.

“I have to go, now,” I said.

“Will I see you again?” Frederick asked. “I go to Midwood, just next door.”

I nodded, and went.

 

 

The rain began as we were walking home, along Flatbush Avenue.

My Mother, Ruth Schoen, did curse, then, having forgotten to bring her umbrella, in spite of all she knew about the day’s forecast.

In between her curses, she uttered the phrase “one in a thousand.” She said it over and over.

One in a thousand, she said.

In a thousand grown-ups.

Only one in a thousand grown-ups can get a perfect score, on that test.

She said. Over and over.

You could do that. My son could do that, all along. But he thought we didn’t deserve to know it.

Why, why, Herschel, why do you torment us so?

She said. Over and over. In the darkness of the night, and the terrible light of Flatbush Avenue.

Still living in that shithole. Still breaking my back for pennies at the wordmill. Caring for the special needs of a kid who I thought couldn’t even talk. Who I thought was retarded.

And my son thought that was all just fine.

Why, Herschel, with that kind of brains, you could do—anything! You could be a doctor, a lawyer—why, you could even give the bastards on Wall Street a run for their money!

Don’t you think I want to know these things? About my son?

Or do you think it’s just all right, us living in that shithole, and Miriam not being able to afford her tuition any longer? And me, breaking my back for pennies, down at the wordmill?

Why, why, do you torment me so? With your not talking, and your stupid selfish pride?

I had told her the answer before, and she did not understand.

I told it to her again, then, on Flatbush Avenue. And she did not understand. Because she had forgotten.

But I held no malice in my heart toward her, and I forgave her. As I had forgiven her before, and would again.