“Hi,” she says, distinctly.
“I have this to give you.”
She takes the sack and turns it over in her hands. Now she looks at me.
“You are an official courier, right?”
“I don’t know how official I am. They send me to deliver things and I do it. If that makes me official, I’m official. If more is needed, then I guess I’m not.”
“You go by ‘Thanks,’ don’t you?”
“That’s me.”
“I have to go,” the other woman says, taking a step to the side and spreading her hands from her waist.
“Just a minute, Ateh. This is Ateh, by the way.”
She turns to me.
“And I’m Vissi Sislelemmy,” she adds as an afterthought, a moment before turning back to the woman she calls Ateh. “Would you stick around a second? I want to have a witness for this.”
Back to me again, extending a hand toward me, palm down.
“Don’t worry, it’s all... pro-forma. Now—”
She draws a folding knife from one of her pockets, opens it, and uses it to pop the stitches sealing the sack. Then she pulls the mouth open and thrusts her fingers inside, holding it up to the light and peering in, holding it open for Ateh to inspect.
“What do you think?”
“Looks fine,” Ateh says.
“But should he be carrying it?”
“Clare Guerrero told me to carry it.”
“Listen,” Vissi Sislelemmy says to me, with a frank shake of her head. “If Clare Guerrero tells you to do something, you don’t necessarily—I mean, that doesn’t grant you the privilege all by itself of allowing you to carry what she’s telling you to carry.”
She taps the sack with a finger.
“Now I don’t know if you’ve tampered with this.”
I fold my arms.
“Hold on,” she raises it in her hand, palm out. “I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I’m just saying that there’s a question of protocol here that needs to get sorted out before we do anything further.”
“Like what? What have we further got to do?”
As I’m saying this, she’s confusing me by answering at the same time.
“In case there’s any...”
She waits until I stop.
“Just in case there’s any doubts, I want to make sure there are no more doubts. No doubts that can be cast on this particular exchange. I may be called upon to give this back to you, or to transact other exchanges with you now. And I can’t do that until I know whether or not there are going to be any reasons for concern about the channels. Because the administrators of Chorncenantra, at the dispatching node I report back to, are very picky about whether or not these materials are transferred in the proper way. If they aren’t, then the other side can call foul and the whole thing goes into this whole process of adjudication that can stymie both sides for... for a really long time, all right? And I don’t want to get embroiled in anything like that and neither do you, trust me! So let’s just clear this question up now, while we have an investigator here. This is as much about protecting you as it is about protecting me.”
She turns to Ateh, who shakes her head and shrugs.
“Clare is a Central, this should be fine.”
“But does Clare have the authority... I mean, does her say-so make him—” she points to me across her torso, still looking at Ateh, “—an authenticated claimant? Or...?”
“Well, he would have to have been working in that capacity here.”
“I have been,” I say, but the agent turns and indicates to me I should keep quiet, gently waving her hands at me as if to say, just hold on, hold on.
“Working for who?”
“For Guerrero—”
“Clare or Arturo?”
“For Arturo.”
Vissi Sislelemmy turns to me.
“Have you delivered anything for Arturo?”
“Sure,” I say flatly. This is starting to irritate me.
“Specifically for him? Or on the foreman’s authority? I’m sorry to be so fussy about this, but it is important.”
“Specifically for him.”
“What? Can you remember? What it was?”
“You can’t ask me to divulge what he entrusted to me.”
“All right, all right, but what kinds of things?”
“...Again, I can’t tell you that.”
She looks at me.
“This was... these are confidential matters.”
She shakes her head.
“They can’t be confidential, because you’re not a confidential courier. You have to be specially accredited and badged to be a confidential courier, and the badge has to be on display at all times.”
I shake my head.
“What’s the use of a confidential courier when everybody knows about it? Half the point of confidentiality is that people don’t know when and if you’re trying to keep something confidential. A confidential courier, complete with badge, would be a dead give away—or a specially-designated decoy.”
“I’m just telling you what’s in the policy,” the agent says. “That’s not up to either one of us.”
“Policy doesn’t trump strategy,” I say.
“That’s true,” the agent says reasonably. “Ateh, you have any thoughts?”
“I think he’s right. Look, I really have to go.”
I’ve noticed that Ateh is dressed in an unusually formal get-up herself.
“Why don’t I send Maria over with a copy of the manual?”
“Good idea,” the agent says. “He and I will wait here.”
Ateh hurries off before I can answer.
“This’ll only take a second,” Vissi Sislelemmy tells me briskly.
“Swell.”
A pair of young men, both dressed in pale pastel green suits that are easily the brightest and least dingy sights I’ve seen in I don’t know how long, skid past us both, carefully holding between them a colossal wedding cake.
“Mighty fancy wedding,” I say.
“You know,” she says, with the air of someone who’s been waiting for a moment to discuss something in private, “You have quite a reputation. You know that?”
I sigh and rub my eyes.
“I don’t know what I do and what I don’t know. Is this what you have to tell me?”
She doesn’t seem to hear my question.
“I saw you once, while you were walking with the bag. You know what I mean—walking.”
She pushes her hands out in front of her in a gesture that suggests ploughing through a house of cards or something.
“I thought you looked like a killer.”
Now she’s nodding, giving me that frank look, telling me something for my own good.
“And other people notice things like that.”
“Oh, really?”
“You go charging along like a wrecking ball. You don’t even glance to the right or to the left of you. I’ll bet you haven’t even bothered to take a look around the fugue screen when you’re inside—just straight ahead—!”
“What is there to see?”
“Check and see. It’s very interesting. You know what your problem is, is you don’t know your own strength and you smash everything. Too willful. That’s not a good thing in a courier.”
“Right.”
“You’ll see what I mean.”
“I’m big and dumb and I got nothing to show for my trouble.”
“Do you really call it nothing?”
“Call what?”
The agent bares her teeth and sucks air through them. Maria walks over to us smiling, calls “hello” to us in her musical voice. She’s literally dolled up in a bridesmaid’s outfit and she’s carrying a battered, flabby old book with a limp plastic cover and many many onionskin pages, held open, a passage pinned under one of her tapering fingers.
“Found it,” she chirps, looking up at us pertly. She’s been reading and walking.
“Let’s have it,”
Vissi Sislelemmy says.
Maria reads aloud under her breath. “...and for that there is provision made for getting a furtherance be it mumble mumble mumble let them then be pleased to remit.”
“Sorry.”
More murmuring.
“It must be an older version.”
She flips the cover up, glancing at it, then goes back to the passage.
“Here. ‘For ye purposes of secrecie in the conveyaunce of Correspondence, consider’d distincktlie & appart from ye indyghtment of partickuler instrucktions or other artickalls of writting, a specialle provisionne shalle be made for thatte ye courree may be reckonned a lawfull courree by they who have ye receiving of pappers contayninge intelligaunces, to be shewn by an Ensign, such as a Badge, Stamp, or Word, pressent’d to ye courree at tyme of his dispatching, & knowne to those offycers who are to have them or to suche as are deput’d to register, but otherwyse to nonne.’”
“So,” Vissi Sislelemmy says. “Uh, thank you, Maria.”
Maria smiles, folding the book shut, and walks away as graceful as a gazelle.
“So, you’ve got to show me a badge or something if you want me to take this.”
Vissi Sislelemmy smartly holds the packet out to me.
“If I translated that creaky old jargon correctly, it said that the sign the courier gets is to be presented to people who are meant to have them. But you aren’t the final recipient of that thing.”
I point to the packet.
“You’re just another courier, like me. It doesn’t say anything about showing signs when a courier relays something to another courier.”
“Ah,” Vissi Sislelemmy raises her index finger. “It doesn’t say, ‘receives finally,’ but only ‘receives.’”
“It says ‘officers.’ And it says that no one else is to know what the sign is, apart from those officers.”
“A courier is an officer.”
“If they meant courier, they would have put courier. They said officer.”
“Well,” she shrugs. “I guess we’ll have to call Maria back and check again.”
“Let me know what you find out.”
I start to leave.
“Wait a minute!” she cries. “You can’t leave me with this until we’ve cleared this up!”
“Send me a secret message.”
“There’s something else!” she yells. “I have something for you.”
An endless supply, or at least as much as she needs to keep me hung up until whatever it is they’re trying to keep me from finding out about is over. I keep walking.
“Leave it with Maria,” I call back.
“I can’t leave it with Maria. It’s too sensitive!”
“Then leave it with Guerrero!” I call over my shoulder.
“I have to give it to you! It’s not for Guerrero!”
I stop, and let her see me smile.
“Is this something you’re keeping from him?”
“I don’t mean that—”
“Then,” I turn and walk, not to be stopped again, “leave it with Guerrero.”
Rows of colored lights without sources scale the artifact, drawing steadily together as they climb. There’s an opening in the tarps and scaffolding. I can just get there, scrambling up a heap of talings. A cavern with irregular, squared facets is crumbled here into the body of the artifact, deep cobalt blue. The lights float about like balloons, pale yellow inside, and then a sketchy lavender further out, like imperfectly-lit colored glass.
The Operationals are having a wing ding down in there. Music is playing—there’s a band over by a heap of charred bodies. The Operationals dance with what looks like more effort than enjoyment, sweat glistening on their faces and dripping from their bodies. Many of them have opened or removed their clothing, and steam rises from the skin. More of them sit around on stones, barrels, and even coffins. They pass around heavy, unmarked bottles of thick brown glass, with round pig-snout spouts.
They’ve thrown off their stoic dignity and they suddenly seem coarse, weatherbeaten, and vulgar to me. And it’s a surprising relief, because at the same time they start to seem warmer, more sympathetic. That frightening self-containment and good behavior is all gone. Good for them, I think.
There’s a thin chorus of faint, high voices that rises and falls above and around their singing, coming from the heap of charred bodies. This is a little advanced for me, I think.
Wandering back, I walk all over the place as though only watching had been enough to make me tipsy, too. The Galvophones launch themselves from rooftop to rooftop and, with hoarse cheers, leap the lanes dividing the darkened barracks. They take spectacular trick shots with their tape rifles, setting weathervanes spinning and pigeons flapping crazily in puffs of blown-off feathers. Squawking cats zip for cover, and a rain of perforated coins comes twinkling down like autumn leaves turning in the sun.
Unseen, or at least unremarked, I orbit the camp. That’s what I want: a place in which I have no part. I want to ride through space like wind in wind and sleep on the void, and be a go-between with nothing but between. I only know useless knowledge. The camp spins there to one side of me like so many floating candles collecting in a weak eddy. What I feel inside myself is fierce and calm; it’s a ruthless desire for an immortality of perfect weakness where I can be a tirelessly efficient functionary turning things over from one end of the message circuit to the other and back again, so that I never stop going back. As long as I’m going back, logically speaking, I yet won’t be back, only now am I getting under way. No one sees you while you’re in transit and the moment you arrive is the moment you have to turn around and leave again, provided there is some return correspondence, and even if there isn’t, it doesn’t matter, because there’s nothing to do but wait for some other message which will sooner or later have to go out and take you along with it.
I must be inside the so-called “fugue screen” because, as I look around, I catch sight of many different, confusing things in bewilderingly rapid succession. I see a figure ploughing through the world with the bag sparking and fizzing at the end of his arm and a blank, staring face, my face—dead, the implacable advance the body makes despite the obvious fatigue, blastedness, heatstroke. Dim ruin spreads out before the slack, dead face and the body is only a flimsy scarecrow attached to the bag, which runs on adamant, extradimensional rails and carries the body along for form’s sake.
There’s the artifact. It’s a grid. It’s a perfect machine that doesn’t want to move. The grid looks like a squashed honeycomb lit from behind, and in strictly regular rows that don’t quite line up. Each row is like the rim of a wheel, and a rim whirls while all the others stand still, like a vertical slot machine; there’s a stylus reading the moving ranks, too, and it resembles a wriggling bug caught in the brownish membrane of a translucent stomach. For all that it is an imprecise-seeming instrument, it tracks the ranks exactly, and might be standing still with the grid veering back and forth around it. There’s a real shock of vertigo when one stops suddenly.
The artifact is a gambling machine!
Craning my neck, I look up and see a pair of magnificent doctors seated, facing each other, in the air. Splendor fountains out of them.
What I can report about them: both wore formal attire, had long feet in brightly polished shoes, and sat in plain, high-backed chairs. Maybe there might have been long, beautiful hands draped over the arm rests. The knowledge that they are doctors, and not housewives or cabdrivers or pearl divers, is placed in my mind. The bag gives out with that fatal little ditty again and I think I’m see-sawing wildly to and fro across the camp, as if I were riding a huge pendulum that kept altering its angle, although again I get the feeling it’s the camp that’s turning under me and I’m stationary.
Now I don’t want anything, even though I still have fierce longing for I don’t know what,—to become a living and conscious illusion and melt in clouds of images. Eternal acceleration has always been my idea of heaven. And being for other people
the person I am when I’m alone, only the ghost of my immanent self, really, and having nothing in common even with myself. That’s what’s wrong with the no-limit infinity guys who think it’s a matter of accumulating merit or accumulating anything for that matter. Sure, live forever and there’s nothing you won’t be able to do—people who talk like that don’t take failure seriously. Failing most of the time is one of the only sure signs you’re doing something real. So, maybe infinite ability means endless failures.
I’m still whipping through the camp. The trance is both brittle and elastic, like a soap bubble. I have to be careful, because I don’t want it to break. I’ve never wanted a trance to end...
Infinity lovers like to think in terms of accumulation. They believe life is progress, but you don’t go on and keep who you were before, that’s the movement. That bygone self doesn’t get socked away underneath you like a step in an ever-escalating pyramid raised by your efforts; it sure isn’t the pyramid; it dies for you to live so that you can die for the next one. Up and up, higher with each swing.
I can see over the artifact to the smoke-ribboned landscape on the other side. There’s the plant, and now, through the screen, other plants appear. The sweep of their surveillance overlaps, converging on the camp in huge, dimly luminous fans. The plants are neither fully animal nor vegetable nor are they fully the decaying severed heads of inhuman giants, and, by decomposing, they mass produce phantoms like filmy scraps of eerily exhausted light turning into mist, wind, and dusk. They come down as rain to form pools. They whirl by overhead with giddy, precarious wildness, their frail cries fade endlessly without ever entirely disappearing.
Suddenly I catch sight of Loring down there, and my head, which was already well on the way to becoming a fog bank or something, sharpens so that the atoms all fix their gaze on him intently. He’s looking all around, trying not to make noise. Little does he know that I am all the more surreptitiously spying on him!
What’s the fucker up to? He’s got a funny little gizmo in his hand and he’s flourishing it in front of a pedestal. I’ve never seen that pedestal there before. It’s transparent, with the puckered outline of a leaf lying on the surface of still water, protruding from the ground next to one of the offices. There’s a mistiness about it that indicates it ordinarily is invisible. Loring touches different parts of the pedestal with his gizmo, and its shape alters every time, or so I think. I’m zig-zagging in long swoops over the camp, but as I pass Loring, I’m able to bring him in very close. His head jerks when I come in though, like a man listening for a mosquito, so I have to make sure I don’t give myself away. The thing is starting to look more and more like a tape gun, but my hand can already heft and check it in passing and I know, by its great density and the pebbly texture of its atoms, that it is a powerful intervening device.
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