An Unusual Angle

by Greg Egan

  Aggressive teachers patrol the grandstand confiscating books, cards, and radios. We are here to enjoy ourselves and to support those hard-working competitors!

  Even here there is a vast array of loudspeakers. Who needs 1984-style two-way complete communication? One-way is enough. Pump enough garbage at the population and you don’t need to look or listen to know they’re stuffed full of it, quite incapable of thinking clearly, for the thoughts of most people speak with such soft and uncertain voices that they are easily shouted down.

  Enthusiastic English teacher inevitably explodes with 1000 watts (RMS) of ecstasy at every record-rending result.

  —J. Millar, of Hackett, has broken the fifty parsec dog-paddle record of 2.041 microseconds by a phenomenal 54, yes, 54 millimicroseconds, setting a brand new record for the fifty parsec dog-paddle event at 1.987 microseconds! Well done, J. Millar of Hackett! Let’s hear some applause from the Hackett stand for J. Millar! That’s so feeble I could hardly hear it, surely you can do better than that! Now that’s more like it! Have you heard the one about the vacuum-cleaner salesman?

  Among the worst discomforts is the unquenchable thirst.

  The lower part of each grandstand is filled with the faction’s cheering-squad, consisting mainly of girls. The cheer leader puts them all under hypnosis a week before the carnival, then implants a post-hypnotic suggestion that on the day of the carnival they will think they are attending a rock concert by a popular overseas group. They thus behave accordingly. A rather ingenious approach is used to achieve the right chant: the girls are made to forget the name of the sexiest member of the group and to instead associate the name of their faction with that gorgeous body and that explosive voice. A wonderfully effective combination of screaming, hysterical crying, and fainting results. Cheer leaders also occasionally spur on their mesmerised slave-victims by waving large stuffed pandas in front of them. The appearance of the pandas is generally close enough to the appearance of their singing idols to bring on sudden, intensified bouts of frenzied activity.

  Hypnotism is, of course, out of the question for the competitors. Their performance may only be augmented by the use of drugs and/or threats of physical violence. Such tricks as the positioning of large masses so as to increase the path lengths of the other factions’ lanes, and the creation of spatially limited back currents isolated to specific lanes by invisible monomolecular viscosity barriers, are common practice. I am one of the few who notice such activities, but they don’t worry me at all, as the outcomes of the senseless races mean nothing to me. I cannot understand why so many people scream so passionately for such insubstantial victories.

  Clowns wander about the poolside, now and then leaping into the water and riding along on competitors’ backs. Odd beasts, deformed humans, even the famous Elephant Man, are paraded past the grandstands in cages, between races, to the mocking jeers of the cheering-squad members and spectators, to be spat on by competitors in various stages of undress. Witches and other more frightening creatures who generally hide from civilisation come out brazenly to exhibit their deformed souls, like insolent distorting mirrors. From this I shield myself with the greatest possible care, for the dangers are terrifying, unlimited. I don’t know why they have to go and open such doors at all.

  —Mythic this

  Mythic that

  You’re just a scaredy-cat!

  chants the rabbit, but he doesn’t linger, oh, no!

  I whistle Beethoven, sound-safe in the noise.

  Three or four male staff members avoid normal supervisory duties by prowling around the pool with very expensive German cameras fitted with very long telephoto lenses (very odd, for the whole point of the telephoto design is to give a long focal length from a short barrel), clearly all hoping to catch an interesting cleavage. Supposedly they are serving in some semi-official capacity, but I peer through their lenses and ascertain that none of the shots they take would be of any interest from a sporting point of view, and certainly none could be published in the school magazine.

  In the untouchables’ quarters, we compromise. Clandestine reading takes place, despite the stupid thugs and the heat and the unbelievable noise as the cheering-squad zombies tear out their larynxes (fleshy fragments fly) in orgasms of shrieking enthusiasm. Some students sketch teachers who willingly pose in bizarre positions (unknowingly). Some students amuse themselves with frantic cheering for other factions than their own. What disloyal scoundrels! Some students take fuller advantage of the blanket of sound, and scream unheard obscene insults at the tops of their voices. Some students carve strange and frightening designs on their bodies with knives and razor blades. That’s the kind of day it is.

  Lunchtime and we are allowed onto the grass above the grandstand but eating only makes the thirst worse so the best part is the shade of trees where we can read unmolested and look out onto freedom. The ragged would-be swimmers of the general public peer in with a different idea of freedom on their minds. The seven-foot electrified barbed-wire fence, designed to keep trespassers out of the swimming pool grounds, unfortunately works in both directions. The flesh chars on the hands of those who grip it from outside, but they cling to it regardless, as if we had something obsessively desirable to them in here. It must be the water, I suppose.

  I think of climbing, cutting, and digging, but I have no tools with me, and my telekinetic abilities are too feeble to be of any real help. If the claustrophobia becomes too much I could try to swap bodies with one of the pathetic, skinny wire-clingers, who would no doubt be glad to have gained entry even by such a disorienting ordeal, but I don’t much fancy life with charred hands. Not, as I have said, that I much need my hands, but burnt ones are so unsightly. Much, much worse: I would probably lose all my filmic equipment, and that would be virtual suicide.

  Cut to a close-up of a tiny bird hopping around on the branches of a tree growing beside the fence. Starter’s pistol on sound track, very loud and echo-enhanced. Bird flies off, startled by the pistol, over the fence, and glides down onto the branch of a distant tree.

  Long track with camera looking back along its path, parallel to the fence, past hundreds of black and brown hands poking in through the wire. Very narrow depth of field, so individual hands sharpen briefly and then dissolve again into the murky background-foreground blur. What a lot of hands there seem to be; many more than the number of people present ought to possess. Why do they hang there, trying to make us feel guilty? I refuse to feel guilty: I’m suffering, so there!

  The public address announces that we must now hurry back to the grandstands. Who can argue? It overwhelms our inputs.

  The cheering-squad did not even stop for lunch but stayed to encourage divers to fall in carefully controlled contortions from great heights into tiny tubs of bright red fluid, perhaps wine. Some are coughing up blood-spattered slivers of mucous membrane, and spongy grey matter with identifiable tracery of fine tubing exposed on its torn surfaces, but they still shout on for the greater glory of their faction. No matter how hard I try to fool myself that it is all done with hypnotism and rock group (surrogates), I must (must I?) face the truth, which is that every one of those chanting, screaming, hysterical girls has free will, and is screaming not for women’s liberation or an end to war or capitalism or starvation in Ethiopia, but for a brass cup from which nobody will ever drink.

  Free will. Mmmm. Lucky for me that I was born after the discovery of quantum mechanics, for the clear impossibility of such a thing under Newtonian mechanics would have depressed me constantly. Maybe the cheering-squad members are just no good at manipulating the wave-functions of the constituents of their brains, and leave everything up to chance and external influences. A brief warm sympathy floods me, then is gone. I will teach you all how to change that; I will ignore you. Despise you. Stay away! They stay away anyway, oblivious. Me and my silly delusions of altruistic grandeur.

  A witch meets my eye and cackles hideously. I shudder and divert light around her, making her vanish, almost: an uneas
y patch of disturbing distortion takes her place.

  Then come the relays and it is so exciting and wonderful and always so close and the electronic English teacher says:

  —Cheer louder! We must have more encouragement! I still can’t hear you, Hackett! That’s the spirit!

  When it is all finished they add up long rows of numbers and then they call the losers first to increase the suspense; of course even they, hopeless failures, receive enormous cheers because who cares winning isn’t everything it’s how you play just the spirit of the teamwork trying is the most impotent thing honourable striving lends dignity (but will it ask for it back later?)!

  —Fourth, with a total of … third, with a total of … second, with a total of … and first, with a total of …

  And you can hear both the increase in total volume of the screaming, and the shift in loudest source position from grandstand to grandstand. Brief thoughts of an audience being persuaded to contribute to multitrack sound, by handing out cue sheets to everyone corresponding to their seating position. They would never co-operate, alas. Audiences are such useless collections of incompetents: the best they can ever manage is singing along (out of tune and getting all the words wrong) with The Rocky Horror Picture Show and all that does is drown the sound of the professionals singing from the screen. Me and my bright ideas.

  And then from nowhere arrives our fearless Principal who has been of course all day engaged in tireless (unflagging) pursuit of our collective happiness by mysterious and subtle means (his presence earlier would have been ‘undignified’).

  Why has he assumed material form now? He is going to talk!

  What is he going to talk about? About everything, and also about nothing!

  Now that’s truly profound!

  Sometimes I wish I understood what I was thinking about, but it probably wouldn’t be worth the trouble to find out.

  Here goes.

  —Well, kids, I’ve only been here for about five minutes, yet I have seen some pretty remarkable things. I am impressed. I’m really impressed. You’ve shown me that you can be mature, sensible, responsible young people, young adults really, even though most of you have a bit of a way to go there, and still enjoy yourselves. Even in the very short time, the very short time that I’ve been here, I’ve seen this school improve under my very eyes! I’ve seen a growing sense of co-operation and teamwork and school spirit and sportsmanship and …

  As he talks, the camera turns upwards to the sky, which is very, very blue, and completely cloudless. How beautiful and clear! Foolish divers, to choose to fall into those flimsy barrels of wine rather than taking long, wondering breaths and then dropping gracefully into that huge blue pool, to make ripples concentric with the horizon. By the time the camera is pointing straight up, a gradual fading of the sound track has reduced the babbling (slow babbling, strangely stressed) to a soft mumbling sound which gets lost in the sky.

  I think: I can make that dive! I can! I will fall like an anti-Icarus into the sky, and then bask mindless in the sun-warmth. But something anchors me, I can’t say what.

  He takes the brass cup in his hands, and then somebody starts to come forward to accept it. Quickly, tilt down to horizontal once again, and dolly in with that somebody, very quickly bringing up the sound, bringing in the applause and cheering and the heartbeat and nervous swallowing of the poor fool heading for Seward. Now get right up close, follow that brass monstrosity! Seward’s middle must be in the very centre of the shot, with his shoulders and legs out of the way.

  The cup is in his left hand, and he has his right hand sticking out in front of him because he wants to shake hands with whoever is getting the cup.

  Whoever is getting the cup, however, does not realise this. His mind is in snatch-and-retreat mode, treasure-from-dragon mode. Quite sensible, too. Who would want to linger in Seward’s shadow for longer than absolutely necessary?

  —Not I!

  said the rabbit, darting unseen just inches above the cup.

  The cup-receiver reaches for the cup with his right hand, the hand Seward wants to shake. Seward is offended, outraged, apoplectic. He jerks the cup back out of the terrified boy’s reach.

  —Don’t you want to shake my hand?

  his voice thunders through the grandstand even without electronic amplification, and makes ripples on the empty swimming pool which slop water over the edge onto the hot concrete.

  —Of course I don’t want to touch your slimy paw, you noisy, flatulent old gasbag!

  but that’s only me under my breath. In the silence.

  Then Seward realises that he has gone too far, the context will not support him, the disbelief will not stay up there forever. There is only one way out: it becomes a Joke.

  Demented laughter breaks through his words:

  —Well, I guess you’re just eager to get hold of this and get it back to your team-mates, eh? Eh? You certainly do deserve it, I must say! What a terrific fight you put up, in that last relay, you were hanging in there by the skin of your teeth, I could see you were just inches, just inches in front of that other fellow on that last lap, and out of breath too but you just kept on pushing yourself harder and harder because you knew it was worth it, you knew that the pain, well that was just a bit of pain, that wouldn’t last long, that wouldn’t last forever, although it might have seemed that way at the time, eh, but that would be over soon and you’d have won. Naturally winning isn’t everything, is it? Still you have to try, you have to try to win as hard as you can, and that’s what counts. You can be sure, I give you my word on this, you can be sure that if you go out into the world and really try, you will succeed, you will get the things you want, you will have the satisfaction of knowing you’ve done your best, and people out there aren’t going to ignore your efforts, believe me, when they see someone putting everything they’ve got into it they sit up and take notice! The one really important thing is never to give up and never to do less than your very best, because you know you’ll be rewarded. Well, son, here’s your reward for your splendid effort!

  He thrusts the cup into shaking hands, then whacks the poor kid across the shoulders. The boy falls, and does not get up. An alert prefect (slime, slime) picks up the cup and carries it back to the rest of the winning team, who are by now very impatient. Later, perhaps, they will urinate into it, during strange changing-room ceremonies which should not be thought about by decent human beings, anthropologists and documentary-makers excluded.

  —And now I’d like you all to show your appreciation for the physical education staff, who worked so very hard to make today such a splendid success for everyone!

  —Stuff the morons!

  I yell but my voice is lost beneath an inexplicable roar, an explosion of applause.

  How sick.

  Half an hour picking up food wrappers (except for members of the winning faction; was that small privilege their entire motivation?) and then we are on the bus home and oh my we get out from school half an hour early today what a fine end to a day of fun and excitement.

  Well, yes, it was a lump. I will be able to see it for quite some distance (by which I mean the path integral along my world-line in subjective space-time of the infinitesimal metric). Where would I be without cretins forcing me into loathsome situations? I would have to think up lots of ways to make lumps by myself. No need to panic: there will always be cretins forcing me into loathsome situations, it is a basic principle of society that cretins will force me into loathsome situations. I am safe in that respect.

  I screen and edit and rescreen and re-edit but something is missing, the sequence seems empty. The deformed people and animals, and the charred hands through the barbed-wire fence, are so disturbing that I just don’t know what to do with them.

  And the next day at school, everyone is just like normal and I see a girl from one of the cheering-squads sitting on a bench reading poems by Byron and there is an expression on her face full of complex emotion and flashback to a shot from the day before which
shows the very same girl leaping about and screaming and zoom in on her face ugly with gritted teeth between angry yelling and anguish of tension, then split the frame to bring in her face now as she sits calmly reading the poetry, her eyes scanning the lines three times each and a kind of smile of amusement (awe (astonishment (appreciation))) as the meaning sinks in and I can tell she is thinking that the poetry is brilliant and beautiful and that she is happy because she never had thought of that in terms of that and she just cannot get over it, it is overpoweringly wonderful, and as she discovers more and more a wide grin spreads across her face, she is so surprised and entertained and interested that she is almost embarrassed by it, almost feels guilty to be so happy and smiling from mere poetry.

  —Ineluctable duality of personality

  comments the rabbit rushing past Room 10, then away.

  What would he know?

  —Oh, this and that

  he replies from the top of the flag pole.

  Then she drops the book and loses the page and swears and there is yesterday’s face once more in every minute detail and just to prove it I send out a viewpoint and move it around until it is taking a shot with exactly the same scale and orientation as the carnival shot, and then I slide the two shots together, demonstrating their perfect correspondence.

  In English I write about the carnival exactly as I saw it and the teacher says:

  —You know, too much cynicism is not healthy!

  Now that’s truly profound!

  Time, of course, dilutes the depressing aspects and as the day goes on I begin to accept it as just one more reference point in a grid, and yet at the same time I am sad that I feel less nauseated because surely there should be some lasting record (reminder (revolting remembrance)) of the sickness of it all.

  And then with a huge shock I realise that there is no need for that at all, for a terrible reason:

  It will all be repeated in a year’s time.

  Lest we forget!