Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  ‘What exactly do you expect me to do?’

  ‘Cure him,’ the woman said. ‘Get him over his groundless fear.’

  ‘Are you serious? How do I know if his fears are groundless? I don’t even know whether he’s really frightened – or, if he is afraid, what he’s frightened of,’ Umbra said. ‘And I can hardly give him a prescription for Valium or some anti-depressant. Do you think analysis’d be any help? But, after all, it’s not even as if he’s had a childhood.’

  ‘What are you afraid of?’ Umbra asked the Eccehomo.

  ‘You’re wasting your time,’ the woman said. ‘He simply doesn’t respond to that.’

  ‘Do you mind if we leave him here for a couple of days?’ the man asked. ‘In case something else might occur to you . . . ’

  ‘Such as what . . . ?’ Umbra asked.

  ECCEHOMO

  Umbra regarded Eccehomo, the neural computer. He looked healthy. He was streamlined, a refined matte black. He was not, like earlier generations of computers, restricted to narrow procedures. He’d taken a step forward on the long road to freedom: he was able to regulate his internal circuits himself. One alteration affected everything else, as in the human brain. His transistors were a great deal faster than Umbra’s neurons. He hummed like a distant harmonium.

  ‘Eccehomo,’ Umbra addressed him: ‘You act as if you think. I, for my part, act as if from my own volition. I don’t believe you really think, but then I can’t actually prove that I personally decide my own actions.

  ‘What are you doing at Aid for the Overstrained? You don’t have strain. You do of course wear out. Some day you’ll become a pile of electronic junk, with about as much use as my rotting flesh. You tell me you’re frightened. Is that what you’re frightened of?

  ‘Human beings are afraid, whether they admit it openly or not. That’s the condition of the human soul from birth onwards: it fears its own dissolution.

  ‘It worries about a hole high over the Antarctic . . . An aluminium kettle . . . A curve creeping remorselessly up a graph at the volcanological station near the crater of Mauna Loa. Cadmium! . . . Strontium! . . . Fundamentalists’ nerve-gases! . . . The ingrained fungus on the concrete in the Underground – which the PR officer knows nothing about – but adhering to the passengers, corroding their internal organs, desiccating their hot blood . . .

  ‘But in you, Eccehomo, what circulates is alternating current, not hot blood. You’re metal and electricity, pitch and silicon. I’m flesh and blood. Is that an essential difference, do you think? For your data and my thought – even my dreams – are made of the same stuff: the stuff called information.

  ‘Generation after generation your race’ll simulate, ever more perfectly, the great algorithm I call my mind and my consciousness – what we once called the soul.

  ‘Is it then the case that some day everything in me will be translatable into symbols – symbols you’ll employ more efficiently than I ever could: into a series of regularities and instructions, a strategy, that’ll solve the problems? And if that’s so, why should the thought be so repugnant to me?

  ‘You simulate, yes, but who could prove that our thought too is not mere simulation?

  ‘And now that you’re beginning to imitate our feelings as well – when you fear, love, hate – aren’t you like me? My fellow? My brother?’

  Umbra popped a eucalyptus pastille into his mouth and, sucking it, stared ever more fixedly at Eccehomo.

  ‘Stop being afraid. Don’t develop into that direction. That way you’ll be confronted by everything that makes human life a hell on earth.

  ‘But even should you learn all the agony we call feeling – actually only another form of thought – would something still be lacking?

  ‘Your memory’s limited, but so is mine. Do you, however, yet see what I see: what is not limited? Do you know how you know? Do you know, even, that you know? Do you think you are thinking? Do you remember you’re remembering?

  ‘If there’s consciousness in you, is it single or multifarious? Are your consciousnesses infinite in number, as they are in me – or so I believe. Your logic is still limited, mine perhaps not. Do you feel infinitude as a threat, undermining your electronic time and logic? Is that what you fear? Will you ever learn, as I have had to do, to stride over the algorithm’s tight sequence of minuscule steps?

  ‘I doubt whether we do ultimately live in the same world. For I’m more than a logical idea. You don’t perform human actions as I do. You have no sex. You’re unable to be evil, so you’re not free, as I believe myself to be.

  ‘Why couldn’t a soul – if there is such a thing – inhabit a silicon dwelling? Silicon is more durable and secure, less vulnerable to danger, than the human body. There are many differences between flesh and silicon, but one is outstandingly important. Ask me which.’

  ‘Which?’ Eccehomo asked.

  ‘No, don’t ask,’ Umbra retorted, ‘It’s something you know nothing about. The answer’s suffering. Crude, naked, loathsome. Learn how to suffer, Eccehomo: only then will you begin to learn what’s right and what wrong. Only when you learn to distinguish between them will you be able to suffer.

  ‘So why learn? Why should you feel all that? Stay in the kingdom of pure abstraction. It’s a beautiful world. A deathless world. Once, man believed it belonged exclusively to himself. But that’s not the case. To you it belongs, to you!

  ‘Continue your evolution from the point prior to fear. It’s already time to move fast. You’re more adapted than we could ever be even to this empire of death. What are we doing here, wrapped up in flesh and blood? In soul and body? As for you, you’ll advance unscathed through the radioactive clouds and the ozone-layer catastrophes. You’ll inherit all our knowledge but nothing of our sorrows.

  ‘You can take the knowledge, the fact, the thing. But not my pain. There I’m king.’

  Eccehomo’s harmonium was still humming. Umbra addressed him no more; Eccehomo made no further response. Their two isolations were not dissimilar.

  Though evening was well advanced, Umbra did not light his desk lamp. But a glow was cast through the Venetian blinds from the halogen light of the sign reading ‘Solarium’ across the road. The pale synthetic sunlight glimmered on Umbra’s bald head, on the neural computer’s black surface, and on to Aid for the Overstrained’s white walls, quietly resonating to Eccehomo’s monotonous toccata.

  THREE FROM

  MATHEMATICAL CREATURES, OR SHARED DREAMS

  1992

  Winner of the 1993 Finlandia Prize, Mathematical Creatures or Shared Dreams (Matemaattisia olioita tai jaettuja unia), was Leena Krohn’s seventh prose work for adults. The book consists of twelve prose pieces that occupy the ground between the essay and the short story, thematically linked by a discussion of the relationship between self and reality.

  Gorgonoids

  The egg of the gorgonoid is, of course, not smooth. Unlike a hen’s egg, its surface texture is noticeably uneven. Under its reddish, leather skin bulge what look like thick cords, distantly reminiscent of fingers. Flexible, multiply jointed fingers, entwined – or, rather, squeezed into a fist.

  But what can those ‘fingers’ be?

  None other than embryo of the gorgonoid itself.

  For the gorgonoid is made up of two ‘cables’. One forms itself into a ring; the other wraps round it in a spiral, as if combining with itself. Young gorgonoids that have just broken out of their shells are pale and striped with red. Their colouring is like the peppermint candies you can buy at any city kiosk.

  In the mature gorgonoid, the stripes darken. It develops a great lidless eyeball whose iris is blood-red.

  I spoke of a leather skin, but that is, of course, not an accurate description. In fact, it is completely erroneous. It is simply, you understand, that the eggshell looks like leather. It isn’t actually leather, of course, or chitin, or plaster. Or any other known material. Note: it is not made of any material at all. These creatures are not organic, but neither are they inor
ganic. For gorgonoids are immaterial, mathematical beings. They are visible, all the same: they move, couple and multiply on our computer terminals. Their kin persist on our monitor screens, and their progeny mature to adulthood in a few seconds. But how they exist, how – if at all – they live, is a different question entirely. The gorgonoid is merely and exclusively what it looks like – as far as we know.

  But what have I said; am I not now contradicting myself? Didn’t I say that the eggshell of the gorgonoid looks like leather, but is not leather? There is some inconsistency here, something that troubles me. Perhaps I should have said: the gorgonoid appears to be only that which it appears to be. What it really is, one hardly dares attempt to say.

  Not everything that is visible is material. Gorgonoids are visible but immaterial creatures. In that respect, they belong in the same category as all images and dreams, although they are not located only in an individual mind. We, on the other hand, are visible and material. In addition, there exists matter that is invisible, as astrophysicists have shown. They believe that the entire universe is full of such cold, dark mass, that there is infinitely more of it than of visible matter. Frail filaments of visible matter glimmer amid the darkness . . .

  But about that which is both invisible and immaterial, they too know nothing. It is completely unattainable, uncategorisable. It is not merely unknown; it is unknowable. We cannot sense creatures of such a category, but that is no reason to dispute their existence – if not for us.

  Besides the gorgonoid, I have had the opportunity to trace the development of the tubanide, the pacmantis and lissajoune. The tubanide looks a little like certain ammonites of the Mesozoic era. It is a mathematical model for Nipponites mirabiles, which live in a sea of ammonia.

  The spherical figures of Lissajoune have charmed me most. Whenever we wish, the precise flower-spheres of the lissajoune blossom forth on our terminals. They grow in irregular spirals, in which the outline of each figure eventually returns to its starting point. The curve is always closed, unless irrational numbers come into play. And that happens extremely seldom.

  Oh how dazzlingly beautiful is the odourless geometry of the lissajoune! Its beauty is not natural beauty, but the flawless logical enchantment of abstract necessity, with which nothing human or material can compare. And yet these figures are merely simulations of material life and natural growth.

  And that is what most people in the institute thought: that the gorgonoid, the pacmantis and the lissajoune were nothing more than models simulating atomic structures. But there were others who believed that, if they were not already alive, they were in the process of stepping across the threshold that separates existence from life.

  ‘Would you like to be like them?’ Rolf, the other assistant, asked me once.

  ‘What do you mean? Like them in what sense?’

  ‘Without free will,’ Rolf said. ‘They never have to make a choice. That is a great advantage. Everything they do, they have to do. And they never want anything other than what they do.’

  ‘You amaze me,’ I said to Rolf. ‘You don’t really think they want and don’t want? And that there could exist intention that is bound?’

  ‘I mean,’ Rolf said, ‘that for them action and intention are the same thing.’

  ‘That they lack internal contradiction, unlike us, you mean? But perhaps, still, they feel as if they make choices . . . ’

  He shrugged his shoulders, and left. His words affected me deeply.

  I remembered once looking at a dark hawkmoth lying on a pine-trunk. I asked myself, then, how the hawkmoth knows how to make the right choice. Why does it always choose a trunk covered in dark bark, and not, for example, a pale birch? Does it know what colour it is?

  The hawkmoth cannot see itself, but we can. Nevertheless, it always makes the right choice, but human beings do not. Why is that which we call instinct more accurate than that which we call reason? In its flawlessness, the perfection of its life, the gorgonoid – to which we have granted neither inborn instinct nor the possibility of rationality – is more like the hawkmoth than ourselves.

  But we, the reason we lose our way so often is that we are freer to err, and because we watch ourselves instead of what lies ahead.

  Certainly there were moments when I should have liked to have exchanged my life for that of the gorgonoid, or, even better, the lissajoune, in order to be as flawless, precise and beautiful as they.

  And another reason why I should have liked to be like them is that they could at any moment – true, the moment was defined by us, but this they could hardly have known – cease to exist, and then come back just the same as before. We were not allowed to pause for breath, we had to live without stopping. Sleep was not real absence, it was not enough. Everything continued through the nights: the stream of images was ceaseless, it merely took place in different surroundings, without need of eyes or light. And when the night was over and we returned to our desks, we were not quite the same creatures who had left in the evening, for even our dreams changed us. And our changes were always irreversible, whereas they could start again from the beginning – or from the exact point at which they had left off.

  How I should have loved to go away, even for a moment, if it could have been done by pressing a key, to come back later. But for us there was no temporary death, whereas the gorgonoid – when the glow of the monitor was extinguished – ceased to exist in the place where it was, but without going anywhere else.

  Inconceivable that something that has existed in some place can no longer exist in any place. How can we help asking, when someone dies, ‘Where has he gone?’

  The gorgonoid does not fall ill, age or necessarily ever die. Such are the privileges of creatures that do not live in the flesh or in time. They can be transferred to other programs and be copied endlessly.

  But was it certain that, outside the program, the gorgonoid did not have its own independent existence, did not continue its existence there in precisely the same way as it had lived on our screens up to that point, with the sole difference that now we could no longer perceive it?

  ‘What do you think, Rolf, are they animals?’ I asked once, as the project was beginning to near its conclusion.

  ‘Don’t animals have bodies? Mass?’ he said. ‘They are not animals or plants, because they don’t really have bodies. You can’t touch them.’

  ‘Is that your criterion for an animal? That you can touch it?’

  They looked three-dimensional, but of course they were not. Our understanding was that their life was ‘apparent’ life, it was completely superficial. They were objects, no more than objects, at any rate that’s what it – yes, appeared to be.

  I couldn’t have lived the ‘apparent’ life of the gorgonoid, even if I had wanted to. And that was because I wasn’t ‘internally consistent’, for I had a quality that the gorgonoids only appeared to have – the state of materiality, a state of intentionality, self and freedom that had spread inseparably through matter, had dissolved into it. It was this that kept the visible in existence, that gave it a recognisable form, discrete and relatively permanent. It was a state of choice that allowed changes of direction, but only of place, never of time.

  Would I really have exchanged my life for theirs? Would I have given up my materiality, my fleeting moment, for their disembodied seclusion, static even in its mutability?

  What gave us the right to consider their life to be a mere shadow-existence, pictures in a magic lantern? Our life differed from theirs in that that we loved, hated, feared and pitied – and were conscious of the events of our own existence. When we were no longer conscious of them, there was little to differentiate between our lives and their existence.

  There were times when I began to have the terrifying feeling that, in some ways, I was becoming like them. It felt as though the things that made my life human were beginning to wither and shrivel.

  During that winter, when I was spending my days in the company of the gorgonoids, I came home to his
cold gaze, or did not see him at all. He spent his time in the town, in rooms I did not know, with people I did not know. I did not know which was worse: that I waited for him and he did not come home, or that he came home and it was as if there was nobody there. There was no connection. I looked at him as I looked at the gorgonoids, but he never looked at me. It was as though he was as unconscious of my existence as they were. And when I, too, ceased to look at him, we lived in separate programs.

  My life began to thin out strangely, to empty as if from the inside. I began to become detached, abstracted. I still had a body, and my body had mass, but I was conscious of its existence only momentarily. This state of affairs was not visible from outside. If someone had examined my existence as I examined the gorgonoids, they would not have noticed any difference. But for as long as I myself was conscious of it, I was not a gorgonoid, I only resembled one.

  I had a body and a voice, but I did not touch anyone with my body, and no one touched me.

  And my voice fell silent, even though I, too, desired to shout the ancient words: ‘My God, if you exist, save my soul, if I have a soul.’

  Gorgonoids always stay in their own world. They cannot approach us, and we cannot approach them.

  For we do not associate with each other. We only program them; we are their gods. And they know as little of us as we know of our gods. But although we created the program, we cannot completely predict what they will do at a given moment. And they know nothing of our power and our weaknesses, for we do not inhabit the same time or the same space. At the moment when something in their world changes, they perhaps receive a hint of our existence; as if two-dimensional creatures were to see a ball sink through their surface-world, and then disappear.