An Unusual Angle

by Greg Egan

  I decide to forget about it.

  After a few pages I put down the book and go to the drawer and pick up the square in my handkerchief. The edges cut my handkerchief in two places. They did not cut the envelope. I put the square on my desk with a corner protruding into space, so that I can pick it up again by the faces.

  I tap it in a few places with my finger tip. It makes very little noise. It does not seem to be hollow but it’s hard to tell.

  Why not do something dramatic? I’m sick of subtlety.

  I get a hammer. Then I bash the square violently in the centre.

  The hammer bounces slightly, the square vibrates from the impact and bounces off the desk. The corner of the desk top is a little frayed.

  I pick up the square with two pens held like tweezers, put it back on the desk. It isn’t marked.

  Let’s try some more subtlety.

  I say:

  —Open!

  —Open, sesame!

  —Ouvrez!

  —I am your new master. You will obey commands from me only, from this moment onwards. Activate yourself.

  —ON!

  —SWITCH ON!

  —PLEASE SWITCH ON!

  —PRETTY PLEASE SWITCH ON!

  No response. Why do I feel silly?

  Then I press my thumb against it. I try the other thumb. All my fingers.

  It is not keyed to open on fingerprint identification.

  Why am I presuming that it can open?

  Maybe it’s just decorative. Maybe it’s money. Maybe it’s a bomb.

  I put it under the blankets of my bed to see if it will glow in the dark. It doesn’t.

  I put it in boiling water, then boiling ammonia (which turns out to be a bit of a waste of time because all the ammonia leaves solution and poisons the air in the kitchen). I find some old nitric acid from a Chemistry Phase I went through. No effect. I heat it a little, still nothing. I’m afraid to boil it because I have no goggles or protective clothing and hot nitric acid is very unpleasant.

  Then I wash it in cold water, dry it (little drops of water cling to the surface and won’t shake off) on my bath towel, and put it back on top of my desk.

  —Nobody can say I didn’t try.

  No response.

  Perhaps there’s a new key-sentence form.

  I don’t have time to try every conceivable permutation, so I try a few likely ones:

  —You can’t do anything. It’s impossible for you to move. You’re inert, lifeless, dull, boring, bland. You can’t speak! You have no credit rating. You watch The Young Doctors.

  The square makes no attempt to contradict me.

  It clearly has no pride.

  It may have been sent just to frustrate me. It could be inert and lifeless. It could be solid metal, without any purpose. Just to make a fool out of me.

  I put it back in the drawer. Let it make the first move.

  The next day I receive a second square. It is identical. I try holding the two squares together in all kinds of ways, seeing if they’ll recognise each other and attach themselves somehow. Nothing happens. I give up in disgust, and I leave the second one on top of the first in the drawer.

  The next day I receive a third square. And again no amount of manipulation of the three together makes anything happen.

  The next day is Saturday and there is no mail. I cannot think all weekend. I cannot read, write, or sleep. Wondering if there’ll be another one.

  On Monday there is no red square in the mail. I take the three out and manipulate them in a few more ways. Nothing.

  On Tuesday, nothing in the mail. I decide to forget about it all. Why worry? If they have a purpose, surely it will be revealed to me. Or why bother sending them?

  A test? With no questions, no clues? Here is an inscrutable square—scrutinise it!

  Nothing on Wednesday. The problem of the squares begins to stop occupying all of my time—I can think of other things, do things without stopping in the middle and running up to my room to try some new test.

  Then the thought occurs to me that perhaps the Goal to be Reached for Something Amazing to Happen is not to solve any mystery about the squares, but rather to not think about the squares at all for a whole day, or something like that.

  Which makes it hard not to think about them. I start waking up each morning thinking about them. And dreaming about them. I manage to pass three solid days without opening the drawer, except in dreams. Then I open it. Nothing seems to have changed. Nothing special has happened.

  I feel like burying them in the back garden where I can’t get at them, but my mind would always be on them, thinking: What if they’re doing something now?

  And it would drive me mad so I’d have to dig them up again.

  If I could only destroy them. It would haunt me for a while, not knowing what their purpose was, but I would forget eventually. I could throw them in the bin! Once they were taken, I’d never ever be able to get them back. Which would be the same as destroying them.

  So I do. On Saturday. The rubbish is collected on Mondays.

  I delve into the vegetable cuttings and filth four times before Monday, to check that they are still there. Just In Case.

  Then they come and take them away.

  On Tuesday I receive a square in the mail.

  And on Wednesday, and on Thursday.

  Three again.

  The same three? No way to know. I’m not sure whether the question means anything. It doesn’t with electrons.

  However.

  I’m not sure whether or not I should throw these out too. I can’t make myself do it.

  Then I decide to experiment.

  Throwing them into the river is losing them irretrievably.

  Tuesday of the next week, at eleven in the morning, I throw the squares into the Swan River. Illegal pollution.

  Wednesday I get the first new square. Postmarked at the GPO at midday, Tuesday.

  Another one on Thursday, on Friday.

  Monday, at one o’clock in the afternoon, I throw them in the river.

  Tuesday, I get a new one. Postmarked at midday, Monday.

  And one on Wednesday, one on Thursday, each postmarked at midday on the previous day.

  One week of holidays left. Where did they all go?

  On the Monday of the last week, I catch the bus at the same time as the previous Monday, and go and stand beside the river. At one o’clock, although I have the three metal squares with me, I throw in three squares of cardboard covered with aluminium foil.

  Nothing in the mail the next day.

  Were they postmarked at the GPO? If so, the bunny has time travel.

  Or a very good understanding of what I will and will not do.

  Either one is a frightening possibility.

  The squares are probably introduced, pre-postmarked, into the mail bag going to the local post office. Matter transportation.

  Now what?

  I play around some more with the latent three. I bash them and try to scratch them, I arrange them in every pattern that I can think of, I talk to them, yell at them, sing to them. No response.

  I try to contact the rabbit with telepathy. I try sending viewpoints out on long-distance trips, hoping to tempt him into re-creating the hemisphere. I get some shots as good as satellite photographs, but I hardly look at them.

  Because there’s no response.

  In all good science-fiction novels, they bombard the alien artifact with dozens of types of radiation. They X-ray it. They study the mass distribution by spinning it on many different axes and measuring the changes in rotational inertia. And that sort of thing.

  Life is never like a good science-fiction novel.

  At least not for me.

  Maybe it is for Carl Sagan.

  If I sent them to a University they’d get lost in red tape and academic jealousy.

  If I sent them to the CSIRO then they’d be intercepted by ASIO before they ever reached a scientist, and I’d be imprisoned for espionage and a
nti-American feelings.

  That’s the way it is.

  If I sent them to a private company, they’d bury them in an underground vault and never let them out, for fear that studying them could reveal an advanced technology that would outmode all current manufacturing processes—and replace them with something efficient.

  As opposed to cheap.

  I’ll just keep them here in my bottom drawer, where I keep things when I don’t know what to do with them.

  Chapter 16

  DISSECTION

  It never rains.

  Cliché!

  But I didn’t even complete it!

  By implication, however.

  Leave me alone, I can’t help it. I’m suffering.

  In Turkey, Iran, Iraq, USSR, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Chile, Argentina, China, North and South Korea, East and West Germany, Kampuchea, Vietnam, Ethiopia, USA, Indonesia, Ireland, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Spain, Portugal, Paraguay, Israel, Libya, Thailand, Czechoslovakia, Brazil, Peru, Laos, Tunisia, Tanzania, Ghana, Algeria, Cameroun, Uruguay, Yemen, Guatemala, Singapore, Bulgaria, Egypt, Afghanistan, Colombia, Sudan, Malaysia, Poland, Zaire, El Salvador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Taiwan, and, probably, right here too, people are being tortured. They are being beaten and electrocuted and drugged and lobotomised and raped and starved and humiliated.

  I try to feel it, but I can’t seem to feel any of it. I try to help, but I can’t seem to concentrate. Or remember. Hey, woops, sorry. Someone told me you were all out there dying in agony, but I plum forgot.

  —Shit or get off the pot!

  scowls a tall American politician.

  What a way with words he has! It’s what happens when I try to think things through.

  Like I was saying: it never rains. Everything leaps out and grabs me at once. Quite apart from the thousands of strangers throughout the world undergoing unthinkable (to me, lucky me) atrocities,

  —Why get it out if you’re not going to use it?

  scowls the tall American politician. He is wearing tinted glasses. What a poet he is! I wish he’d go away. I’m so tired and I have a terrible headache, although it is quiet in the operating theatre, and the air is pleasantly cool and dry. I am chained to the ceiling at my wrists and ankles, with a leather strap supporting me at the waist. Two metres of cotton bandage has been stuffed down my throat as a gag, but no blindfold. I can see everything that goes on below.

  It’s not completely silent. There is the slow, shallow breathing of the patients—or is that sound coming from the nervous theatre staff? No, they’re calm and smiling. There is the just perceptible hum of the electronic monitoring equipment. Occasional softly spoken requests for scalpels, swabs, retractors. Faint footsteps every now and then.

  I have put green filters on all the lights in the theatre to give a dark, brooding feeling to the scene. Flesh tones are alien, blood is black.

  It must make it hard for them to see. Perhaps they’ll slip with their scalpels, sever something vital, kill all the patients. I would like that very much, because they are all good friends. What they’re doing to them is much worse than death.

  They’re taking them apart while they’re still alive. They’re separating them, spreading them out on clean, white sheets, so that their hearts, though still connected to their lungs, sit metres away. They’re going to stick in probes at all the important intersections, to measure the rates of flow of body fluids, and the pH factors, and the blood counts, and the temperatures. And that sort of thing.

  I am helpless. But I must film it. There must be some evidence which one day I can show the world.

  Lot of good that’ll do.

  Not that I’ll ever be able to.

  Shut up.

  A new incision. Blood spurts high into the air, then stops as the artery is clamped. A muffled sob of anguish.

  I start crying in throbbing spasms, my gag becomes soaked with saliva, and I begin to choke. The saliva trapped around the gag blocks off even my nose, and there is no way for air to reach my lungs.

  Well.

  I am going to die.

  Nobody in the theatre will help me. They’re having too much fun. I try to force the gag out with my tongue (like Henry Spencer’s cute baby rejecting food in Eraserhead) but the bandage is packed too tightly.

  A quarter of a mile away, in my desk drawer, are three squares of metal posted to me by an extraterrestrial rabbit.

  Now they are hovering in the air below me, shining with a blinding blue-white light.

  Nobody in the theatre notices.

  Even if they looked up, they would not be able to see them. They are too hard to scratch with a scalpel, and in any case they have no structure whatsoever to lay bare. They are without any sensible reason or definable purpose. They are arbitrarily chosen, childish chunks of meaningless magic.

  Not entirely to my taste, but the perfect defence.

  My choking stops. The saliva dries up. The bandage, once swollen with moisture, constricts to a mere wisp of cotton thread. And I can breathe again.

  The squares vanish.

  —Nobody can say I’m ungrateful

  I think outwards joyously.

  —I wouldn’t think of denying it under these circumstances

  says a telepathic whisper in my brain.

  I’ve made it! Contact!

  —Yes, fine, but don’t get too excited or you’ll choke again. This communication is something of a special effort … we’re having a lot of problems here at Central Control. It seems to be working partially, but it’s behaving very oddly. It’s over twenty thousand light years away at the moment, you know, and sending this conversation faster than light has all sorts of nasty side-effects, like creating multiple universes and closed loops in space-time, all of which take a lot of work to clean up. Especially the way things are at the moment. I’m not sure when I’ll be in touch again. Those squares, however, are with you permanently. They only transmit themselves at a little under light speed, so they’re not messy to use. Any time you’re really desperately in need of help, you’ll get it from them … good luck!

  And then it is over and there is no time for the million and one

  Cliché!

  Shut up!

  questions in my mind like why the hemisphere and your eccentric behaviour and why are you helping me now and how did those squares get posted and …

  A faint but just perceptible murmur says:

  (Yes, the murmur is not speech, but it speaks to me itself.)

  —Squares were beamed down from an orbiting robot satellite with a whole stock of them … it can manufacture more, if need be. The hemisphere, and all of my behaviour on Earth, was controlled directly by you. Don’t expect me to explain it, I could only observe. I was on Earth in a form unable to do anything by my own choice, in order to avoid dangerous and non-deletable paradoxes, so every action I performed was controlled by you.

  Why me?

  —You were where I ended up. I came to Earth to find out what was screwing up Central Control, but precisely because Central Control was so screwed up, I had to abandon my powers of causality. I guess you were the strongest influence. I didn’t learn a single thing about our problems, I’m afraid, but I must say I liked some of your films. It really was quite recreational to give up my powers of decision and just be your audience. Anyway, we may actually have found the source of our problem back here. I’m sure that nothing can interfere with Central Control for long. I’m confident that.

  It stops again. I wait for more. There is no more.

  Central Control? Non-deletable paradoxes?

  It is all too much to absorb at once so I turn my mind back to the briefly forgotten dissections taking place below.

  One surgeon is probing around through her patient’s many far-flung organs, looking desperately for something. But it isn’t there, not what she’s looking for.

  That makes me laugh.

  Well, if it wasn’t for this gag …

  She’s looking for a type of tumour in which she ha
s specialised. She had a theory: every organism has a tumour of this type, hidden somewhere.

  There goes her theory, literally out of the window: a grey, rat-like, bird-like, bat-like twitching thing. She may never be the same again. Then again, she may stay exactly the same, pretending that she has found the tumour. I just want to get out of here.

  —Where are you going?

  —I, ah, I, sorry, I thought …

  —Thought what? Sit down, would you.

  —Yes. Sorry.

  —Now, I’m sure somebody here can remember, somebody can help me, I distinctly remember reading a passage where Salinger describes nail holes in Holden’s palms. I can’t seem to find it right now.

  Every incident, every sentence has been torn to shreds. Every innocent human fear and hope has been forced and battered into the shape of some sterile metaphysical metaphor. As if that is not enough, she insists on ferreting about in the ruins for her ridiculous obsession. Hence my odd position.

  Phoebe, I still love you!

  Another group of butchers toys with a different victim.

  They speed up and slow down the metabolism at will, freeze it, play it backwards. Every emotion, every action, every realisation, is analysed in dehydrating detail.

  —Would you like that bit again?

  asks the surgeon. They all nod and giggle quietly. He touches the right buttons, and the once-living thing does an automated dance. An act that was meaningful, once through, becomes absurd and comical from senseless repetition.

  The pace changes suddenly. What’s left of the patient starts to struggle violently. Strange groans come not from the mouth but from the entire disassembled body. A nurse is thrown through the air; she lands with a dull thud against the theatre wall, slides to the floor. Two surgeons and two nurses grab frantically at the wildly flailing limbs.

  Something small and vicious bursts from the ribcage, eating its way through the air on a triumphant trajectory straight for the senior surgeon’s throat, but he is much too fast for it: he brushes a button and it turns to ice, tiny teeth bared but useless. He takes out a toothbrush and starts to clean them, humming something from a Disney film.