I jump at him, grab him by his lapels and shake him.
“I have a—sister,” he says jerkily.
“They can also have sisters!”
He’s laughing, perhaps in fright. His body is limp, his head flung back, mouth showing all his teeth and his eyes are dreamy. I shake him, and the laughter spills like dust from a feather duster. Like saucers spilling one by one from a tall stack.
“If I were you,” Clare’s voice comes to me, calmly, from somewhere, “I’d let him alone. That’s my advice.”
My hands open. I wasn’t consulted. Darren’s teeth click together with a jolt as his bottom hits the floor, and his laughter shatters in coughs and hiccups.
“Are you one, too?” I ask. “Was that bit with the kids just a gag at my expense?”
“I’m a Central,” Clare says.
She stands before me now, gaunt white and tall. Her lips are pointed.
“But he’s one of them,” I point at Darren.
He sits between his palms watching us with a look of demented glee on his face.
“Darren is a pervert.”
It’s as if she were letting me know he’s an art expert or a vegetarian.
“Do tell!”
“That is his role. Perverters are necessary.”
“He was made for the job.”
“Yes. It is a ‘job.’”
I can tell she regards the word as a vulgarity.
“Explaining things to you is too difficult. You understand Chorncendantra so badly.”
“Is this my fault?”
“You haven’t the first idea of the calculations that must be done in order to adjust to the disruption you cause simply by being here. Haven’t you noticed the way he’s been winding you up all this time?”
I hear a soft moan of disappointment from the corner.
She throws open one of the doors and gestures to me to go through.
“There is a rationalization down the hall.” She consults the little jewelled watch on her wrist. “It should just be starting.”
“You mean, like, High Rationals meeting? Right now?”
“You heard him,” Clare says, indicating her brother. “He can’t lie outright—that’s not allowed. The Halls of Joy are open. They are here.”
I cross to her, and stop when I’m close enough to smell her perfume. For the first time, she gives the impression of being blind. Her head is tilted back. Her profile breaks up the light from a window; it’s a very delicate profile.
“The Halls of Joy...” I mutter sourly.
I climb up into a kind of a flimsy shelter clapped like a hat on top of the building, perhaps as an afterthought. No, not an afterthought, but a festive installation, like a tent for a wedding. The frame of the structure consists of polished, slender columns of maroon stone whose bases are hidden by a false floor of dark marble panels. Beams are lashed to the columns with thick old ropes that look as friable as plaited straw. Upright boards are cinched to the beams with loops of rope, and stitched to each other with rows of staples.
It’s ordinary rope, but the “boards” are translucent slabs of precious stone, grained with fractures and particulate impurities. Ruby sheets, sapphire sheets, emerald sheets. Diamond sheets. So the whole structure gives slightly, this way and that, with the wind, with any alteration in the distribution of weight. I don’t think the floor panels are solidly rooted either, in fact, as I take a few steps on them, I get the idea they rest on a gelatinous matrix. A rubber rig rests on the columns and there’s a sharply-raked roof fixed to it somehow; my vision can’t pull much out of the dense gloom collected up in there—it’s like the inside of a witch’s hat.
An eerie chorus of wind hoons through the gaps in the walls. Ropes creak, and the boards melodiously thump each other now and then. I’m drawn by a hum of voices. It makes me think of the suppressed gaiety of a room full of pupils who have set up a prank for their teacher, and are waiting. I catch a few low, indistinct words in a droll voice, and then a furtive giggle. The room is filled with brick walls, though, and I’ll have to get through them before I can see what I’m hearing. The brick walls rest on solid metal rollers, and appear to be stored here.
A glint catches my eye, and I take a closer look at the wall nearest me. There’s a window in it, complete with garden box and shrivelled flowers, and dimity curtains. The bricks are scarred and sooty, real bricks, but I notice that the pale stuff holding them together isn’t mortar. It’s gold. I can see my squashed reflection in it, peering out from between the bricks. My practice requires me to renounce materialistic desires, and I note with self-approbation how airily I bypass this temptation.
Here, some of the walls have been roughly hauled out of the way, while others were toppled, and stacked on each other like collapsed dominos, to form risers. The High Rationals are gliding all around the cleared area, very gracefully. They move slowly, lightly, from time to time skipping up the risers as nimble as gazelles.
They’re all dressed with great dignity. There isn’t one among them who isn’t dressed with great dignity, and I can’t help but notice how spectacularly well their clothing fits them. There’s no question about it. They’re the real thing. Each one has the referred dignity of a functionary. They go bounding along in pairs and small groups, with linked arms, or holding each other about the shoulders, consult each other sagaciously, taking turns to bend the ear and gaze off into abstraction as the other speaks; and they rationalize completely, nod seriously, confer gravely; composing, assessing, estimating, making useful recommendations, forestalling hasty conclusions, prescribing, distributing, and ordering. Swirling and schooling, like fish.
Their heads tip back with each long stride. Every last one of them brims with self- satisfaction. It sparkles in their eyes, and bows to itself with their lips. It’s becoming a trance. The feeling threatens to become orgiastic.
Not one of them is unaware of me and not one of them acknowledges me. They aren’t pretending I’m not here, though. It’s more like they’re finishing up something else first, completing a thought, even as they get ready to take notice of me, maybe drawing up lists of things that might be said, and then making a judicious selection. Say something that sounds like a greeting, but without promising anything, not even any further attention. Get me to do the talking. Stand back and listen, adopting that old knowing look that has become a reflex with you. You’re not pretending, except perhaps insofar as what you seem to know, and what you really know, might not be the same. You seem to know me, what I’m talking about, but you don’t, or you don’t have any special knowledge of me; but you do know that there’s no way our conversation can go wrong for you. Which is what counts. This conversation may turn out to be only a formality, but even if it doesn’t, it won’t have missed being a formality by much, because you speak strictly in formalities. I’m a nobody. Now, despite my new style of speech, I must grope to put things intelligibly more in the former way.
I stand there, listening to the wind wail in chords through the gaps in the wall. If I walk out right now, that would be a novelty, even for them. Maybe that’s the best I can do, but I didn’t come here not to play the game. I’d be playing the game even if I did walk out, anyway; whatever I do here will be a move in the game. If I were to walk out, I might be out of the game, but resigning the game is still a move, even if it is the last move. Why would I want to give up my chance of influencing the game anyway, when I still don’t know what I want from it? If I want anything from it.
Suddenly, one of the High Rationals stops, looks directly at me, and speaks.
“This is the longest session yet. You’d think we’d get tired of it. It’s been a long time since we had that scary wind installed.”
Her tone suggests it’s only just occurred to her how long it has been, and that it might be time for a change. Her face also tells me that she enjoyed saying it, might still be taking pleasure in what she said.
“I’m not the weatherman, lady. I brought you this.”
I take a
couple of steps toward her, holding out the bag. She flinches as I draw near, and then recoils from me, staring at me with intense interest. While she plainly shrinks from me with instinctual aversion, I don’t think it’s either wholly conscious or wholly unconscious; it’s as if, the sharper her curiosity about me, the more she must withdraw from me. But now she advances, with an unconcealed effort of will, bends forward, and, from her position atop a riser that puts her a couple of feet higher off the floor than I, pinches the fabric of my uplifted sleeve between her thumb and forefinger. She shivers, and, behind a shrewd expression of appraisal, a glimmer of disgust crosses her face.
“This is—the repugnance of the messenger?” she asks, glancing up at her companions.
“Mmm,” the man next to her says affirmatively, in profile, and there are indications of agreement from the others.
Her first words were emphatic: this is. The second half was interrogative, expressing doubt not so much about her conclusion, but about whether or not the others would agree with her. Their agreement plainly gives her some satisfaction, and she releases my sleeve and dusts her hands, lightly flipping her fingers together. I can feel her feverish body heat from here.
“The messenger is always repellent,” booms a chest voice, as hoarse and gravelly as a drive out in front of an English country house.
“Where do you want this?”
Everything about the way they move has a kind of a glide to it. They circle the room as smoothly as leaves swept along by a stream; as if their bodies were buoyant, and their legs only kicking them along. They sweep by me, lifting one leg over the other, diagonally. The heat of their bodies wafts over me in long surfs.
I’ve gotten accustomed to equivocal answers by now, so I lower the bag after a moment or two more, giving my offer time to sink in, and then mingle among the High Rationals. They float away from me, and I actually can feel between us, now that I’m in the midst of them, the disembodiedly rubbery feeling of two magnets repulsing each other. I part them like so many balloons, and their paths reform around me as I go.
My way is blocked now, by a portable wall that was shoved aside, close to the shimmering, particolored screen of the enclosure. This wall creates an eddy in the rationalizations that I can stand in, and observe two of them engaged in animated conversation by a window. One of the two is lost in a shadow, nothing but a reflection in the frames of a pair of glasses, but the other is a short, slight, balding man. As my field of vision includes both him and, through the window, the courtyard outside, I notice that, with each gesture, and each complete statement, he makes, Operationals in the courtyard, faces and hands glistening with perspiration, modify their behavior. The High Rationals puppet the Operationals with cocktail party gestures, and conversation. A raised finger here—a man abruptly turns right in the courtyard. A little statement, accompanied by a modest sort of page-turning gesture of the hand and the elevation of the eyebrows, and an Operational down in the courtyard, just past the High Rational’s hand in my line of sight, turns as though that hand had brushed her gently to one side, and sets down the empty mixing trough she was carrying.
Seated sideways at a table in the center of the whirlpool of High Rationals is a man with perfectly black skin, catatonic with boredom. His elbow is on the table and his head is on his fist, which mashes his cheek, so that his lips are parted in a little flue, and his left hand, index finger extended, ponderously beats time. The irises of his eyes are such an alarming light grey they might be transparent, and it occurs to me he might be another Central. I imagine uniting myself to him with a look that says ‘I have to put up with the same crap,’ but my attempts to catch his eye fail.
There’s also what appears to be a stenographer, but I only catch the briefest glimpse of her. Perched at the point where the roof angles away from the frame, I see another person, a lean cheekbony man with a little camera smashed up against one lens of his sunglasses, filming everything, his long feet and slender ankles dangling in the air.
I now see that many of the High Rationals are manipulating small rectangular packets of space, about the size of a deck of cards, criss-crossed inside with vanes of luminous mist. They handle and manipulate these in a way that reminds me of slider puzzles, where you have all but one tile and you have to keep shunting them around, using that one empty space, until the picture or the sequence is right. The High Rationals also, now and then, raise these rectangles to their faces and appear to drink. Out of total silence, they laugh together, then fall quiet again, then laugh again, without speaking a word.
There’s a shadow that comes and goes at intervals above the window. Craning my neck, I realize it’s being cast by the two globes that revolve around the Newest, which must be overhead. The moment I recognize it, the hum of its pistons comes through the roof. I feel a heat wave, and a throat clears at my side. I turn to face a man I’ve never seen before.
“Haven’t we met somewhere?” I ask.
“I’m the Doctor Everybody Talks To,” he says pleasantly. “I typically look familiar.”
“Such a clear title.”
“Chorncendantra (link link) makes sure everybody’s got a title. Isn’t that cute? Now, what seems to be the problem?”
He talks as if he thought his tongue tasted good.
“I don’t know my title, Doc,” I say.
“This is easily learned. Ask around.”
The doctor is as well dressed as the rest of them; his temples are concave, he’s shorter than I am, and he has a beard and virile moustache of separate white whiskers.
“That’s what I’ve been doing,” I say.
I show him the bag.
“I carry this around wherever I go and nobody wants it and nobody will reject it either. Is this where I’m supposed to be?”
He smiles again.
“Do you know where this is supposed to go?”
Shaking his head, or rather his face, slightly, he says “This is not a matter of knowing. This just has to be at the right place and time.”
“How do I know them when I see them?”
“How does anyone know anything? You take your best guess and...”
He flattens his hand and pushes it toward me, palm down. This could be a plane tootling down a runway or a stack of chips being pushed into a pot or an impaling knife.
“Do I get anything for delivering it?”
He shrugs, and his eyes make two twinkling crescents in his bleached face.
“How about tips?”
His grin brightens.
“This is talking!” he says. “You might find yourself a heavy tipper!”
I glance out at the shadow as it descends over his face.
“Anyway, what is this thing?” I ask.
“This is the Planetary Megalomitochondrion Ehrrr-r-r-r-elay.”
“Ehrrr-r-r-r-elay...”
The stutter goes around the room, passing from voice to voice.
“Ehrrr-r-r-r-elay...”
“What does that mean?”
“This is the coordinator for the synthesis of proteids. They build themselves.”
“There’s more than one?”
“One per planet. This is designed to construct itself from planetary crust when the influence of the contact sun is renewed after the long interval.”
“Who designed them—you?”
“Of course,” he smiles.
“Contact sun, too?”
“This whole system.”
“Operationals I’ve met say they built it themselves.”
“No, no,” he says breezily. “Who else could it have been? This is our work, our doing.”
“Who else could it have been?” another one echoes as she passes.
“The larger a thing is, the more it is in us. We carry all the planets within each of us,” he says with pride.
The light you give off wanders. So I maybe go on wondering where I stand in a scheme of which I have never had any really clear idea, except that there supposedly were stages to it,
like the stages leading to enlightenment. Which stage have I reached now? Is this like advancing through the stations of the cross, or is this like trying to drive the weight up toward the bell with one swing of the mallet—a measure of how far from zero I managed to get on this particular try?
“You design that artifact, too?”
“We did.”
“For star jelly?”
He smiles and shakes his head.
“No, no,” he says as before, and raises a finger. “This is a secret. Even from us.”
“You designed it in secret from yourselves.”
“This is the only way we could find out what it was. By the way, that, eh, that thing, last night, with Loring. That eh... that was nicely played, you know.”
“Shucks.”
“No, no, I’m serious! This is what is meant by ‘resourcefulness.’ And good shot, getting that tape in his ear.”
“Yes!” Here a very tall, very fat woman in black tweed thrusts in her face. Like a zeppelin, she tapers, down to her black shoes. “That really was exciting!”
“I think you deserve something for your trouble there—” he turns to the throng with a sweep of his hand, “—this is agreeable?”
There’s a sudden shout, sudden to come and sudden to go, and now the High Rationals are gathering in two lines like I’m going to run the gauntlet. For a moment they are still taking positions, swooping past me with eyes shining, and there’s no one here. No one here but you. You’re alone. You are alone. None of this is happening. You’re back on earth. You’re alone. Alone, and insane. Insane, and alone. Quiet you I’m the one who gets to say where I am and what I am not you and I’ve got the lumps and bruises to prove it. If I want to see myself enjoyably conversing with a roomful of brainy inflatables, then who’s to say that’s any more idiotic than anything else I might be doing with my irreplaceable time and anyway it doesn’t matter where I am or what’s the game so long as I finally manage to stop just looking in from the outside and get a hand in and play—it’s how I play whatever that matters so shut up.
The Doctor Everybody Talks To whisks his finger at my bag.
“Open this!”
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