Member

by Michael Cisco

  I oblige. He reaches in with a hand that droops like a palm leaf. My heart jerks. Is something finally going to happen? Pulling back the lining from the pouch, he exposes the spells, which have created a blackened, slick area around themselves like an oily nest. For the first time, I look at them without nausea. The doctor pokes at one of them with his finger.

  There’s a thing he does. I don’t know what it is, but it’s a thing. It reminds me of my practice. I only noticed it, and realized its importance, because my practice has prepared me. It’s a very subtle adjustment. Tiny, fleeting, easily missed, but not by me. The doctor opens a pathway between himself and one of the spells, the one he poked. It’s like making eye contact with a strange cat. This must be how you do it.

  So, something to practice. Finally.

  Pulling the spell out, the doctor turns it in his hands. The crescent-shaped tin is sooty with dried slime, and the skin of his fingers makes a faint brushing sound as he handles it. He turns it up in one hand.

  “This is the one. Let’s do this one.”

  They all laugh. My eyes are on him, so I see his laugh. Effortless.

  I catch sight of Guerrero on the far side of the group of High Rationals, watching intently. His mouth looks like a bodiless bird with drooping wings. I know I’ve already described someone else’s mouth, I forget whose, in similar terms. Can I help it if people’s mouths look like birds to me? Guerrero’s eyes are hooded by his lids, his face starkly lit from above, and, clutching the wheels of his chair, he’s raising himself to see better. How did he get up here?

  One of the High Rationals I haven’t seen before, a slender woman, reaches out for the tin, and the doctor steps forward to meet her. The others crowd in at once, and I can’t quite see how they open the case, except that it involves her, the woman, drawing a figure in the air just next to it—or perhaps she’s generating a series of characters in sign language. A rustle of breath goes around, and there’s a delicate, slightly rotten, floral perfume.

  The circle of High Rationals convulses, and a hand lifts the spell for all to inspect, pinched between thumb and forefinger in a saffron yellow hand.

  “This is an object restricted to three dimensions only,” the doctor says hurriedly withdrawing from me, as if this explained why he needed to leave me, and to follow it, because the knot of High Rationals is moving, eyes lit with feral avidity, even as the faces remain composed. The spell is invisible, attracting them like a magnet, passing from hand to hand it may be changing shape. At first, I thought it was like a tiny object, but then they started to handle it more like a living thing, or at least something slippery and unmanageable.

  I see it and go as rigid as if I’d touched a power line.

  I see it. An object of changeable space. They gather in around it now and some of them form a line, spinning it out like a long rope of dough. The universe is doing all the moving. The spell is motionless—my thoughts, my attention, funneling in toward it. They’re kneading my thoughts into this plastic dollop of space, wringing it out and folding it in together, smoke oozing from their lips and eyes, some of them.

  While this was going on, someone, some Operationals, set up ranks of elegant, straight-backed wooden chairs, and now, allowing the spell to drop from their hands to the floor, as many High Rationals as there are chairs seat themselves.

  The spell becomes an invisible border that surrounds everyone but Guerrero, the stenographer and the man with the film camera. Not a border at all—it’s a fundamentally different kind of space, with a plain limit where the difference flips, so that it’s normal on the one side and on the other, but invisibly weird at that one shape.

  The fat woman raises her voice.

  “Begin reasoning...!”

  She claps the backs of her hands to her temples with the fingers together like flippers and bends forward until her head is about level with her knees, chanting a nasal drone.

  “tha ee ga ree ay ta ee ra pee ay ra ta oh fa tha ee sa aye oo ee la ee ka sa pa la ee na ah ga...”

  They’re all doing something different. One stands on his head. A rickety-looking old man lurches up from his seat and begins pacing stiffly up and down. One spins in place, bending and straightening her waist and sticking out her arms like airplane wings except bent at the elbows. They’re chanting, more or less in unison, even the woman rolling to and fro on the floor. Some of them clap. A pasty young man sits bolt upright, doesn’t appear to me to be doing anything at first, until I realize that he is, by means of an incredibly rapid snap of the pelvis, rapping the hind feet of his chair against the floor in an exactly regular beat. The chanting, the various percussive sounds, the mewling of some of the others, combines to form a strictly syncopated rational music of repeat figures and regularly modulating motifs.

  Waves of heat roll off of them and I feel like I’m at the mouth of an open stove. Perspiration trickles down their faces, falls in drops from their chins, the tips of their noses, their ear lobes. Tiny plumes of steam like flakes of milkweed fluff ooze from the fabric stretched across a large woman’s back and form themselves into long whiskers, unfolding around me like a living schematic of everything I see.

  The movements they are making are perfectly reasonable, and right, showing me as I come in closer that these disguises of theirs can be easily brushed aside, that their apparent differences of sex and physical configuration are trivial, at most they are place markers for the real complexities—absurd! Absurd! Weak! As if men weren’t women, as if blacks weren’t white, as if the old weren’t young—for a moment I flatter myself that I’m getting a look at the relays of potential nervous differentiation processes the High Rationals really are, and the connector that articulates to me as a member. I gnash my teeth in frustration at the crude image, that kinked bone zig-zag that hooks me at one end and disappears into the distance. I want it to fade and stop obscuring the real fugue of the ratios balancing me in the scheme.

  I know, I know, I’m not really reasoning. I’m only representing reasoning, as someone who has always been fatally inept at it. Real reasoning is like plunging headlong onto the rocks, in total darkness. I don’t know what it is when it’s happening. For me, it’s like frenzy. Even when I’m proceeding calmly, something goes crazy and scribbles where I can’t see. So, like everyone else, I have to represent reasoning with crystal music and cathedrals of mathematics, just pig shit like everyone who worships reasoning without understanding it, soaring through shells of majestic light palaces up and up into the stratosphere whatever that is and all the time I think I’m celebrating reason I’m actually celebrating my imagination. I’m still under a night sky deep with blurred stars, running in desert hills of invisible coyotes and fragrant desert brush all drunk with reason, all making impeccable judgements. Reason runs through everything—that’s not exact, but the mood of what I mean is there, the exhilarating inevitability of things. Something has come into my mind blurry, and maybe if I can sock it away somewhere where it won’t disappear again, I can sharpen my look and figure it out later.

  The artifact is covered with lights. All along its length, Operationals must be at work. The artifact combed them out of the night sky. The lights are constellations, stuck to the artifact like flies, a Venus startrap. Beyond the lights open the hexagonal mouths of honeycomb cells full of star jelly. Operationals carry long, slender metal rods, like re-bars, upright, one per person—they’re doing something like a drill down there, forming ranks. I watch as opposing lines come together and tilt and cross the bars, forming a row of isoceles V’s.

  A V-shaped metal object, ten feet across at the top where the ends are farthest apart, protrudes from the roof near me. They all line up, and at once there oozes from the artifact a soft giant of a neutral color which glides along the sides and top of the artifact towards the point nearest us, moving like a parade balloon and groping the artifact under its coverings. As I watch, it mashes its face against a certain, thoughtfully-selected spot—it gives me the impression of consciousness—
and drags its flattened, opening face along the surfaces of the artifact itself, apparently ignoring the covering. Near us, I see a darkening cell. It purples and dims like the sky when the sun is almost completely set. When the giant reaches this spot, it lifts its face from the artifact, rolls onto its back, and trundles along the V’s toward us, limp. The face and the front of the body bear an exact imprint of the hidden contours of the artifact’s surface.

  The thing passes us through the building’s own huge metal V; I can make out little of it as it goes by, just that it looks woven. This thing vanishes into the Newest, which hums louder and less dissonantly. Segments of melody travel along threads of light that project over the landscape. One of the High Rationals turns back to the window, and the woods outside go brown under her gaze—glowing fruits appear in the boughs, one here, one there, in what I begin quickly to see is the same rhythm—emitters bob to and fro among the trunks like inflatable elephants and browse on the fruit—Galvophones in their gorilla suits roll up and down slender, winding white paths among the trees—

  The melodic fragments reach the emitters, and they become silver vulvas, and penises that rise up through the landscape; above these organs there form embryonic shapes in midair, the three primary layers that fold together, the innermost one becoming the gastrointestinal tract, the second, the musculoskeletal armature, and the third becomes the endocrine and neural organs, the skin. The embryos have no distinguishable shape: they’re a bit like curly seed pods from locust trees.

  I get it I get it. A reader organelle scans segments of the DNA until it reaches a stop code, leaves the strand and travels to the megalo-mitochondrion, which uses that segment to fabricate a particular proteid.

  “Is this what makes emitters?” I yell over the music.

  “This is the instauration of the proteidoules,” the Doctor corrects me, beaming, raising a finger. Beaming at the opportunity to correct, to speak, to use a technical term, to use a finger.

  “And the proteid-officers, the Galvophones, are the recoders?”

  The Doctor is too busy to answer. His part in all this involves circumambulation, and he’s ambulated away from me just now.

  Visoring my eyes with my hand, I make out bullets swarming like flies over the vulvas. Is this where they come from, too? Perhaps there’s something else... no, they congregate above the openings in both the male and female organs, and now and then I see knives there as well, the edges flutter like butterfly wings, flashing with reflected splinters of dazzling sunlight. Where is the sun?

  Through the first window again I can now see down into the ground, where an exsanguinating centrifuge like the one I saw at 45-KV/9 is whipping people in circles. Why do they do that? A figure stands, feet together, arms upraised, on the twirling center of the centrifuge. Is this a way to rejuvenate Operationals? The ghost of an egg-shaped structure, nearly as tall as the artifact, appears, all covered in Byzantine architecture and machinery. This massive object is a component of the artifact, linked to it by things that resemble huge gills of fungus. It’s also a kind of past mode or something, I think—a previous incarnation of the artifact. Ghostly lights appear on the image, the klaxons sound, and Operationals rush from the barracks below and from everywhere, crowding the lanes and surging toward the artifact. As the sound of the klaxon blares, then ricochets back again from the artifact and from the more remote parts of the camp, the Operationals converge on the image and at once they are defining its foundations, raising its supports, building its skeleton, assembling its materials.

  “More concentration! More! More!”

  It is a past life and a future life at once, something being at once rebuilt and constructed out of the destiny that had always been a part of the artifact. I watch their astoundingly rapid and coordinated work. It exhilarates me. I lean forward to get a better look and I finally see it, the artifact, through the tarping and scaffolding, the thing itself. It is an artificial reef, with a symmetrical geometry based on pretty weird decisions, and smothered in a chaos of mechanical corals. There’s no reason for me to believe that there were no two alike, and I didn’t have that long a look, but I believe it anyway. The thing is a mess; parts of it are clearly in ruins and, right next to those parts, are obviously new sections. The corals twitch as aleatory as living things, even if their rigid, angular configurations and heterogeneity of composition speak unmistakeably of deliberate fabrication. It’s hard to think: are they like hermit crabs, super hermit crabs, that don’t just grab pre-made shells but actually latch on to whole bodies, like a ghost that fashions a corpse for itself? There’s a lake there now, nearly lapping the base of the artifact, and drowned figures dressed in white, holding their arms stiffly out at their sides, are emerging from the water in answer to the siren. Bullets like flocks of migrating geese streak across the water and perforate their bodies, releasing the blue water of concentrated death from their organs that leaves evilly vivid sapphire trails in the duller blue behind them as they continue toward the shore. The four people who accompanied me to the top of the artifact are among them. Yunis is not.

  I turn around. The High Rationals have resumed their former, relaxed posture, these explorers and explainers in one, an ordered mind, but what in it is there to put in order? So an empty mind, aware of its own functioning, its numbed forward momentum. Stupidly, I close the bag, trying to cement certain things in my memory.

  Now the High Rationals are getting up, stretching and sighing. They begin to mill again, starting up slowly, with a sway to and fro, then starting to skip. Fatigue washes over me and I want to lie down.

  The Doctor trips up to me.

  “Wasn’t that nice?”

  Outside the window, the landscape has changed. Most of what I saw is gone, most of what I’m familiar with is back, but there’s something basically different about it that I’m just too tired to bother about right now.

  High Rationals hover. I want to ask them what they changed, and what about the destination of this bag? But I’m afraid to ask that, because I don’t want to be told to give it up, and so to lose my reason for being here. The assurance that my participation will continue... but how do I ask for that without bringing the bag to their attention in a way that will invite a decision about it that could go against me? The Newest dips past the window like a departing whale.

  “Do you,” I ask the one nearest to me, without taking my eyes off the Newest, “have personnel whose specific purpose it is to worship those machines?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean...” I grope for the words, literally pawing the air with my hands. “Like reverentials.”

  “Reverentials! What an idea—reverentials!”

  “You don’t?” I ask.

  That one is swimming off.

  The Doctor, who had been attending momentarily to something else, I don’t know what, now asks me what I thought of their spell.

  “Yeah... I mean it was uh...”

  “Yes?”

  “...Real uh magical.”

  “Good. You will have to leave now. This is a private meeting, from now on.”

  “And go where?”

  “Well, not now, but soon. This is one of several repetitions that will have to be done along much of the length of the artifact.”

  A mental image of crushing weariness pops into my head. It’s me, trudging glassy-eyed and ragged from one of these work camps to another. Operationals coming furtively up to me.

  “Do you know what we are building?” They will ask, and I’ll say ‘no’ or hand them some jive about star jelly and time machines just to give them something to fantasize about belonging to. All that, and more than a lifetime’s supply of exactly this kind of nowhere conversation.

  “Is this necessary?” I ask. “And why do I have to do it?”

  The question surprises him a little.

  “Oh, you don’t,” he says, raising the pitch of his voice. “You can do as you please, of course you can. But you’re better adapted
to the task than most, is all.”

  “That’s interesting,” I say. “How better?”

  “This is a matter of your own particular power.”

  “Power, what are you talking about power?” I say, rubbing my face. This conversation is making me feel about a million years old. “I’ve got no power.”

  “Sure you do!” This from a different High Rational.

  “Haven’t you ever noticed?” the Doctor adds.

  “He means your envy.”

  “This is what he means.”

  “Envy?”

  A gust of outrage lifts me.

  “Envy!” I bellow.

  “Yes! There it is!”

  “I—am—not—envious!”

  “That’s the spirit!”

  “I knew you had it in you old boy!”

  “I am not envious!” I shout at top of my lungs, hopping up onto a chair and balling up my fists.

  “Bailiff, clear the room!” the Doctor calls cheerily.

  One of the shaggies appears at once. I can’t make out whether it’s a man or a woman, and there’s a crown of pastel-colored lights on the head. There are also, protruding through the eyebrows and apparently held in place by a band of clear acrylic across the bridge of the nose, whiskers which I wouldn’t be surprised to discover serve some sort of detective purpose, they so contribute to the bailiff’s already formidable air of bristling alertness.

  The Doctor approaches me smiling, and hands me a crisp white envelope.

  “This is private business. Deliver this for me, won’t you?” he asks, with the wry air of someone who knows he’s surprising someone by asking for a special favor.

  “OK,” I say lamely, taking the letter. “Neither snow nor rain.” My outburst of a moment ago was too revealing. I deflate, and feel pitiful.

  The envelope is addressed to “Room #7A.”

  “Which way is it?”

  “It has to be one way,” he says over his shoulder as he leaves. “You can’t go two ways.”

  The High Rationals disperse in all directions. They’re doing things like putting pens away in breast pockets, inserting little notebooks into their clothing. They curve, so the same faces pass me several times as they spiral out, like water down a drain.