‘Yes,’ said Worse. ‘Any preference?’
‘Buffon’s Noodle Room. We haven’t eaten there for a while.’
‘See you there, six thirty. I’ll bring Satroit.’
Evidently, Sigrid was in an exacting mood. ‘Just his book will be enough, Richard. Satroit’s dead, I remind you.’
As was Marigold, thought Worse. Quite. Our slim volume of refutations will disallow returning.
‘Naturally, I meant return the book,’ he said.
Worse had developed a taste for hot cocoa, partly acquired on the cruise but mostly to avoid coffee in America. He was still in his kitchen filling a mug when there was an intercom call from the security desk in the Grosvenor lobby.
‘Worse.’
‘Good afternoon, Dr Worse. We have a Mr Wotsan here to see you. He says he is from the recruitment agency.’
‘Oh yes.’
Worse had overlooked the time. There had been mention of the agency sending a staffer to inspect Worse’s apartment for occupational health and safety issues. It was explained as part of their routine duty of care to the people they recruited, particularly in domestic and industrial situations. Worse, of course, saw no issues, and just wanted someone to start the job.
‘Watson, did you say?’
‘Yes, Wotsan. Oh, excuse me, Dr Worse. He seems to have disappeared.’
‘Well, when you find him, please give him a lift pass. Tell him level 33. Say there’s no bell. He needs to knock.’
Worse walked quickly through his apartment, surveying the place for obvious hazards. It didn’t look too bad, if one disregarded the reagent shelves and the toxic fume cupboard in the spare bedroom-cum-laboratory, the tangle of data cables and powerlines in the workshop, the poison josephite left balanced on the kitchen table, and the Totengräber kept by the front door. Mrs Brackedger never seemed to notice such things.
A minute later, Worse heard the elevator doors outside his apartment, followed by discreet knocking at his entry. He hid the pistol in a side-table drawer as he passed, and was still sipping cocoa when he opened the door and looked up. Standing before him, one hand holding a small suitcase and the other a sealed letter of introduction, was Hilario.
THE END
APPENDIX A. ADVANCED COMMENTARY, SOURCES, AND READER EXERCISES
CHAPTER 1 The account given here follows closely the dialogue and stage directions of the modern ‘Incident at Bakehouse’ re-enactment referred to in Chapter 27, with minor emendations based on the author’s own research. This is not as historically tenuous as it may seem: the present script has its origins in the 1880s, when a Chicago newspaperman and impresario meticulously reconstructed the event based on interviews with Miss Baker, another witness (Jimmy Danville, a blacksmith’s boy who observed the drama from the bakehouse interior), a sheriff’s deputy (Horace Sims, who arrived on the scene just as Rigo Mortiss was thrown from his horse), and Sheriff Worse himself. The resulting act, with appropriate expurgation, was staged in touring Wild West shows for the entertainment of easterners.
[REMARK What is a town?] It might be noted that even Keff’s ‘fleck of a town’ is a town. Certainly, Rigo’s ‘stinking town’ is. Within the diegetic purview, Dante has an agreed identity (name, location), infrastructure (main street, buildings, cemetery), and the social custom (commerce, benevolent fund, statutes, court process, at the least) expected of a town. Moreover, we learn that it has the usual civic functionaries (lawman, doctor, preacher, and so on) belonging to a town. From the point of view of Rigo and Keff, every municipal officer or service for which they expressed need was provided to them. On physical and functional grounds, then, they had no reason to suppose that Dante was anything but a town. And yet, also from their point of view, that town might have had (and, increasingly, by induction, looked to have) a population of one individual: a single, if protean, inhabitant in the person of Thomas Worse.
Had the two outlaws been more fortunate, and more philosophical, their conversation as they rode away may have been instructive.
‘You were smart, Rigo, getting that sheriff talking about Socrates. He turned nice after that. Nicer than the mongrel killer anyways.’
‘Yes. I find it an excellent method of distracting the law. You know, Keff, I’ve heard of a one-horse town, but never a one-man one.’
‘Yeah. Can’t really say that would be a town though, can we?’
‘I’m not so sure, Keff. Think of it this way. We call people townsfolk because they live in a town. Right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And that preacher, say: he was one of the townsfolk of Dante, wasn’t he?’
‘Yeah. I guess.’
‘Well, looked at another way, we could just as easily say that we call something a town because townsfolk live there.’
‘Course we do, Rigo.’
‘And what we call a ghost town, with no folks at all, isn’t a town, is it?’
‘No way, Rigo.’
‘Which means that a necessary and sufficient condition for saying a place is a town is that townsfolk live there.’
‘Yeah. Interesting.’
‘So, Keff, how many townsfolk do you need to call someplace a town?’
‘I reckon lots. You need saloons and a flophouse and stables and stuff.’
‘Try to be more … abstract, Keff. I’d say that what we saw in Dante is a type of sorites paradox. Only it’s weirder: the way that baker was like a last remaining grain of sand still embodying, in some capacity, the whole heap. It’s as if you remove something but it’s still there, reparcellated, in a different form.’
‘Yeah. Interesting.’
‘Or do you think, Keff, we’re just confusing intension and extension somehow?’
‘No way, Rigo.’
‘Maybe the two move in and out of each other, blend in some way.’
‘Yeah. Interesting.’
‘Maybe there’s a kind of conservation principle happening. Reducing one increases the other. Zerosum semantics, I’d call it.’
‘Yeah. Interesting. Hey Rigo, your mare’s looking touchy on the right foreleg. Could be that the farrier back there was right.’
CHAPTER 7 Model equations describing n-grammar behaviours can be found in several sources, including Tøssentern, op. cit., which also explores a number of special cases. Except in trivial instances, closed form solutions are not obtainable and the system must be solved numerically. A research report appearing in Proceedings of the Lindenblüten Society from Sheila Place, a postdoctoral fellow in Thwistle’s department in Cambridge, raises intriguing philosophical implications. In the original model n is, of course, integervalued. Place experimented with generalizing n to non-integer, including irrational, values, and solving for γ. The only irrational for which convergence was obtained was n = π, and this resulted, extraordinarily, in the solution γ = π (to set precision) also. The author ventured no interpretation of this, but others have quickly proposed that swint grammar may not be strictly triadic (n = 3) but instead n = π = 3.14159…. In simulation studies of artificial languages where n = π, a deviation from the (impossible) ideal k = π to k = 3 results in only a small deterioration in γ. This would suggest that thricing in swints is a stratagem of forced integer approximation, the cost of which is the risk of occasional misunderstanding.
(For those espousing the holiness explanation, the inverse theological question becomes whether the number of the Trinity might truly be π. If this were so, the Godhead would comprise Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, plus a nonrepeating decimal fraction counting a partial fourth—perhaps feminine—divine personage yet to be identified.)
It may be that this potential for ‘misunderstanding’, arising from a small discrepancy between the language parameter n and social number k, is advantageous: it has been suggested that variance introduced in this way could drive the longterm evolution of languages. In the short term (within the lifetime of a species member), it may underlie individuation, personality and creativity. Conversely, this variance
is decreased by structurally embedded redundancy, a feature of most grammars that serves to conserve meaning but also affords resiliency to the grammar itself.
Although the programme of mapping speech markers in swints is well progressed, the problem of decoding semantic content is considerably more difficult, both statistically and computationally. The point is succinctly made by May Ball, the doyenne of avian morphemics, in a celebrated editorial headed ‘Talking to the Animals’ in J. Numerical Ornith. (In the Ferende creation story this faculty is a given, in that Rep’husela would summon and instruct her condors by calling.) One promising line of research involves a visual barrier paradigm and substituting adaptive voice synthesis for one swint of a thrice. When the substitution is reversed, conversation within the thrice alters dramatically, exhibiting a transient increase in the marker question. The elegant methodology is detailed elsewhere in the same journal. Another study, published in Syrinx, describes behavioural anomalies in nestlings and adults following exposure to synthetic birdsong during artificial incubation. In a setting of growing appreciation of the sophistication of animal intelligence (note how the description ‘bird-brained’, once insulting, has become for many an envied compliment), the ethical debate arising from this and similar research designs has been sufficiently vituperative to be labelled by outsiders the Chirping Wars.
It should be made clear that the research establishment is divided on the interpretation of swint speech markers, though not their existence. In particular, mirth is not accepted by those who assert the special holiness of the creature (and there is much evidence in support of that belief, including corroborated scriptures from the first century as well as circumstantial observation). They contend that the unisonous call referred to earlier is wrongly analogized to human laughter, it being instead a congregational response of great piety. In this school, mirth has the alternative catalogue designation amen, and the expectation of those scholars is that swint language (if not birdsong generally), when fully decoded, will be revealed as essentially liturgical. (The saurian world might not have been so festive after all.)
It is therefore no exaggeration to point out that much ecclesiastic dignity—an eliminative realignment of institutional religions, no less—is invested in the swint translation effort, the full implications of which are not widely appreciated. Despite the analytic (and increasingly political) challenges, courageous researchers like Ball and Misgivingston are confident of the project’s ultimate success. Perhaps for our needed wisdom we should turn back five centuries to Leonardo di Boccardo (later, Pope Ignorius, after the saint) who, in his famed Credo submission to the Sacred College entitled The Illusion of the Prophet, observed that succeeding prophets through the ages do not accrete doctrinal authority, but lose it. This is partly because each inevitably amplifies the errors of his predecessors, as well as originating his own for relevance (Leonardo’s private papers reveal a first intention to write ‘vanity’ here). Compounding the difficulty for latecomers is this: were some appropriation by chance to prove accurate, it would properly attract a charge of plagiarism on precedence grounds and be a priori valueless. These, and more modern axiomatic arguments involving proximation and seriality concepts, along with psychological post-profiling and motivational blatancy analysis1, explain the diminishing legitimacy of prophesiers over time.
(Leonardo, of course, sourced much of his insight from St Ignorius, whom we accept as the only validated prophet2 in history, inasmuch as he correctly prophesied later figures would declare as prophets and vitiate whatever holiness had gone before. Remarkable, then, that a doctrinal delinquency not rescued (and then incompletely) until the Enlightenment, and from which the only moral escape became and remains apostasy, was predicted in the first century. The expedient substitution of paternalistic repression for autogenous faith over this time was noted by Leonardo, but the best modern critique is from Ariadne Kuklosian in her Cynics of the Sacrosanct, where the history of the Holy Land is explained using a usurpation paradigm and qualitative methodologies identifying venal and militant principal themes. It should be read alongside Frances Godwilling’s3 The Empire of Prayer, a powerful defence of Kuklosian’s scholarship against sectarian attack.)
If then, among linguists, the school of piety is proven correct, the swint will rightly have restored to it a primacy and innocence beyond the grasping of pretenders (who may yet enjoy the revisionist greatness of being anointed bird-brained). As Timothy Bystander (in Guilty of Reason) has remarked, even an atheistic reading should elicit no surprise that a putative one true prophet of a one true God should speak to us from at least the age of the dinosaurs. The problem for humanity has been arriving late and then not listening.
1 Blatancy analysis, essentially an adaptation of credule theory to lie detection, is concerned with dissonance measurement in the behavioural sciences. Readers of serious journalism will know it as the commonly applied, often satirical SayDoCo (Say–Do coefficient) used to score dishonesty in political, public and ecclesiastical affairs. It takes values from minus one (actions exactly antithetical to expressed intentions) to plus one (perfect consistency between the two). Evangelists and prophets invariably score well below zero. (Statisticians will recognize a parallel with Pearson correlation, on which it is indeed based.)
2 Gender here is important. We acknowledge also Princess Periphereia, the Prophetess of Parsa, whose The flight of gold half-darkens the sun proved an epiphanic truth more than two thousand years after its pronouncement. This elevated her to the status Legitimus (see below, note to Chapter 24).
3 Not to be confused with namesake Fanny Godwilling, the fictional heroine who emancipates her people in Angela Gabrielle’s (a nom de plume, surely) quartet of quatrains of tetrameters, Rubáiyát of the Dispossessed. Initially a work of restrained dissent, the coarseness of fascism first registers in bathetic simple-mindedness:
Grand mufti! Grand mufti! Her cant4
beguiles. No giant kneels in the mosque!5
before a descent into vulgarity and violence expunged, without vindictiveness, by popular uprising.
4 Continental philosophers are traditionally the fearless expositors of this subject. For a contemporary French perspective, see Napoléon Lecémot’s epistolary meditation ‘Recognizing Cant’ posted from Wagon des Philosophes.
5 This curious line is the subject of endless speculation, and suppression. In the context of a breathlessly obsequious religious espionage report, it seems to originate in another voice entirely. Generally taken as predictive more than indicative (the tense is ambiguous, leaving aside intention), it is believed by the devout to be the wisdom of God delivered through Gabrielle directly6 to her readers. As for meaning, the interpretive literature almost invariably references Standing Giant (a pagan figure of indomitable free will, who in later theogonies oversees the passage of souls into the underworld) on this question.
6 An innovation, doubtless born of divine exasperation: excluding the intermediary should reduce transcription errors7, eliminate vanity and bias, and discourage misdirected idolatry of messengers into the future.
7 Some of these are well known and have, for rationalists, a dark comicality about them, particularly in the desperation of clerical denial. A brief survey of mistaken graces, including the fiery origin of ‘the Host’ and the prosaically human inattention that gave rise to God is Great (which, according to al-Fakr’mustiq, in earliest crypt Afro-Asiatic form admits of the plural8, and for purists9 still does) can be found in Appendix 3 of the Kuklosian work cited above.
As that author observes, many such errors, if freely admitted, would pass without censure as curiosities. What Kuklosian holds unforgivable is a foundation of fallacy in spiritual tutelage that not only is fraudulent but amounts to ratiocinative entrapment. For an epigraph, she chose the ritual affirmation:
I believe in God because I believe the word of the prophet.
I believe the word of the prophet because I believe in God.
Mystics have always embra
ced the circular10, but never so resolutely to imprison the mind. (And in a couplet!) Kuklosian again:
We should marvel that every living thing has a proper serving of three virtues: perception, reason and agency. What then shall we name this crime, that a child’s three are blinded, stolen, and denied, and in their place is left a hollow recitation?11
8 Exposing purveyors of a one God to the charge of deceptive conduct, and rendering nonsensical an implicit superlative (or elative: ‘greatest’).
9 So, we conclude, utterers are not purists, and by contraposition purists are not utterers. Purists who are also Semitic lexicologists occasionally point out (after al-Fakr’mustiq) that the phrase is a technical blasphemy and should be abandoned or corrected. French Arabists, in particular, have for centuries made the case; for them it is le cri de damné, inviting Satan into the supplicant soul. This failure to expurgate the solecistic is ascribed to institutional obstinacy, but the true reason is more fundamental. (And intractable: see footnote 5, Appendix B. Bystander has the view that refusal, in the sense given there, is intimately connected to, and possibly not separable from, intellectual timidity12, 13.)
10 For example, the ouroboros. Occultists invariably appropriate the infinite to impress the credulous. Strictly, the engine of argument in the couplet credo is perpetual reciprocation—diallelus. However, in a suitable (logic) phase space this and 2-state circularity (circulus in probando) are seen to be equivalent. A simple, if imperfect, physical analogy for their relation is an oscillating (between two sentences) pendulum that, given sufficient energy, is free to rotate full circle.
11 From The Enemy of Lightness14 and, it may be supposed, explaining the Dispossessed of Gabrielle. Kuklosian’s style generally avoids the rhetorical, and this is a rare exception. (She answers: I call it human sacrifice.)
12 Studies in Cowardice II: The Method of Edict.
13 In a passage known as the Exhortation to Courage in 2 Syllabines, St Ignorius writes that a kingdom of lies is bordered by exile. A modernist guide to apostasy can be found in the expiatory lyrics of Vissy Mofo’s rap masterwork Prayer Hall Émigré Ball (Acridaria Music).
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