In spite of all the chatter, all the diagnosis, all the new consciousness, the most powerful communications made by this new, much-articulated national self were inarticulate. For the real problem was damage not to the machine but to the desirous heart, and the language of the heart was being lost. An excess of this heart damage was the issue, not muscle tone, not food, neither feng shui nor karma, neither godlessness nor God. This was the Jitter Bug that made people mad: excess not of commodities but of their dashed and thwarted hopes. Here in Boom America, the real-life manifestation of Keats’s fabulous realms of gold, here in the doubloon-heavy pot at the rainbow’s end, human expectations were at the highest levels in human history, and so, therefore, were human disappointments. When arsonists lit fires that burned the West, when a man picked up a gun and began killing strangers, when a child picked up a gun and began killing friends, when lumps of concrete smashed the skulls of rich young women, this disappointment for which the word “disappointment” was too weak was the engine driving the killers’ tongue-tied expressiveness. This was the only subject: the crushing of dreams in a land where the right to dream was the national ideological cornerstone, the pulverizing cancellation of personal possibility at a time when the future was opening up to reveal vistas of unimaginable, glittering treasures such as no man or woman had ever dreamed of before. In the tormented flames and anguished bullets Malik Solanka heard a crucial, ignored, unanswered, perhaps unanswerable question the same question, loud and life-shattering as a Munch scream, that he had just asked himself: is this all there is? What, this is it? This is it? People were waking up like Krysztof Waterford-Wajda and realizing that their lives didn’t belong to them. Their bodies didn’t belong to them, and nobody else’s bodies belonged to anyone, either. They no longer saw a reason not to shoot.
Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. The Furies hovered over Malik Solanka, over New York and America, and shrieked. In the streets below, the traffic, human and inhuman, screamed back its enraged assent.
Showered, a little more settled, Solanka remembered that he still hadn’t called Jack. It struck him that he didn’t want to. The Jack unveiled by Neela had disappointed and unnerved him, which in itself should not have mattered. Certainly, Jack must have been disappointed in him many times, even put off by his famous “Solankering” temper. Friends should hurdle such obstacles; yet Solanka did not pick up the phone. Why, then, he was a bad friend too; add that to the lengthening charge sheet. Neela stood between them now. That was it. Never mind that she had broken off her relationship with Jack before anything had started between her and Solanka. What mattered was how Jack would see it, and he would see it as treason. And, if he was honest with himself, Solanka silently admitted, he saw it as a betrayal, too.
Moreover, Neela was now also an obstacle between himself and Eleanor. He had left home for one apparent and one underlying reason: the horrifying fact of the knife in the dark, and, beneath the surface of the marriage, the erosion of what had once overwhelmed. Furious and newly kindled desire was hard to give up for that calmer, gentler old flame. “There must be someone else,” Eleanor had said; and now there was, there was. Neela Mahendra, the last big emotional gamble of his life. Beyond her, if he lost her as he probably would, he saw a desert, its slow white dunes sliding toward a sandy grave. The dangers of the enterprise, accentuated by the differences in age and background, by the damage in him and the whimsicality in her, were considerable. How does a woman for whom every man hungers decide that one is enough? Near the end of their first night together, she had said, “I wasn’t looking for this. I’m not sure I’m ready for it.” She meant that it had started feeling so deep so fast that it scared her. “The risk might be too big.” He had twisted his mouth a little too sourly. “I wonder which of us,” he asked, “is taking the bigger emotional risk.” She had had no trouble with that question. “Oh, you are,” she said.
Wislawa returned to work. Soft-spoken Simon Jay had called Solanka from his farm to say that he and his wife had soothed the angry house cleaner, but a contrite phone call from Solanka would help. Gentle as he was, Mr. Jay did not fail to point out that the lease required the apartment to be properly maintained. Solanka gritted his teeth and made the call. “Okay, I come, why not,” Wislawa had agreed. “You are lucky 1 am big in the heart.” Her work was even less satisfactory than before, but Solanka said nothing. There was an imbalance of power in the apartment. Wislawa entered like a queen—like a Goddess of Victory who had cut her strings—and after a few hours of wandering around the duplex like a monarch on a royal progress, waving her duster like a royal kerchief, departed with a contemptuous expression on her bony face. Those who formerly served were now the masters, Solanka thought. As on Galileo-1, so also in New York.
His imagined world absorbed him more and more. He drew furiously, modeled in clay, whittled soft woods; above all, and furiously, he wrote. Mila Milo’s troop had begun to treat him with a kind of surprised reverence: who’d have thought, their manner seemed to say, that an old duffer could have come up with stuff as hip as this? Even slow, resentful Eddie went along with the new attitude. Solanka, despised by his own house cleaner, was much mollified by the young men’s respect and grew determined to prove worthy of it. Neela took up his nights, but he worked long hours during the days. Three or four hours of sleep proved to be enough. The blood seemed to pump harder through his veins. This, he thought, wondering at his undeserved good fortune, was renewal. Life had unexpectedly dealt him a strong hand, and he would make the most of it. It was time for a long, concentrated, perhaps even healing, burst of what Mila called serious play.
The back-story of events on Galileo—I had taken on a proliferating life of its own. Never before had Solanka needed—wanted—to go into such detail. Fiction had him in its grip, and the figurines themselves began to feel secondary: not ends in themselves, but means. He, who had been so dubious about the coming of the brave new electronic world, was swept off his feet by the possibilities offered by the new technology, with its formal preference for lateral leaps and its relative uninterest in linear progression, a bias that had already bred in its users a greater interest in variation than in chronology. This freedom from the clock, from the tyranny of what happened next, was exhilarating, allowing him to develop his ideas in parallel, without worrying about sequence or step-by-step causation. Links were electronic now, not narrative. Everything existed at once. This was, Solanka realized, an exact mirror of the divine experience of time. Until the advent of hyperlinks, only God had been able to see simultaneously into past, present, and future alike; human beings were imprisoned in the calendar of their days. Now, however, such omniscience was available to all, at the merest click of a mouse.
On the website, as it came into being, visitors would be able to wander at will between the project’s different storylines and themes: Zameen of Rijk’s search for Akasz Kronos, Zameen vs. the Goddess of Victory, the Tale of Two Dollmakers, Mogol the Baburian, Revolt of the Living Dolls 1: The Fall of Kronos, Revolt of the Living Dolls lI (This Time It’s War), The Humanization of the Machines vs. the Mechanization of the Humans, the Battle of the Doubles, Mogol Captures Kronos (or Is It the Dollmaker?), the Recantation of the Dollmaker (or Was It Kronos?), and the grand finale, Revolt of the Living Dolls III: The Fall of the Mogol Empire. Each of these in turn would lead to further pages, plunging ever deeper into the multidimensioned world of the Puppet Kings, offering games to play, video segments to watch, chat rooms to enter, and, naturally, things to buy.
Professor Solanka was intoxicated for hours on end by the Puppet Kings’ six-pack of ethical dilemmas; was at once fascinated and revolted by the emerging personality of Mogol the Baburian, who turned out to be a competent poet, expert astronomer, passionate cultivator of gardens, but also a soldier of Coriolanus-like blood lust, and the most cruel of princes; and was deliriously entranced by the shadow-play possibilities (intellectual, symbolic, confrontational, mystificational, even sexual) of the two
sets of doubles, the encounters between “real” and “real,” “real” and “double,” “double” and “double,” which blissfully demonstrated the dissolution of the frontiers between the categories. He found himself inhabiting a world he greatly preferred to the one outside his window, and thus came to understand what Mila Milo had meant when she said that this was where she felt most alive. Here, inside the electricity, Malik Solanka emerged from the half-life of his Manhattan exile, traveled daily to Galileo-1, and began, once more, to live.
Ever since Little Brain’s censored remarks to Galileo Galilei, questions of knowledge and power, surrender and defiance, ends and means, had gnawed at Solanka. “Galileo moments,” those dramatic occasions when life asked the living whether they would dangerously stand by the truth or prudently recant it, increasingly seemed to him to lie close to the heart of what it was to be human. Man, I wouldn’t have taken that stufflying down. I’d have started a fucking revolution, me. When the possessor of truth was weak and the defender of the lie was strong, was it better to bend before the greater force? Or, by standing firm against it, might one discover a deeper strength in oneself and lay the despot low? When the soldiers of truth launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of the lie, should they be seen as liberators or had they, by using their enemy’s weapons against him, themselves become the scorned barbarians (or even Baburians) whose houses they had set on fire? What were the limits of tolerance? How far, in the pursuit of the right, could we go before we crossed a line, arrived at the antipodes of ourselves, and became wrong?
Near the climax of the back-story of Galileo-1, Solanka embedded one such defining moment. Akasz Kronos, a fugitive from his own creations, was captured in great old age by the Mogol’s soldiers and brought in chains to the Baburian court. By this time the Puppet Kings and the Baburians had been at war for a long generation, locked in a stalemate as debilitating as the Trojan War, and ancient Kronos, as creator of the cyborgs, was blamed for all their deeds. His explanation of his creations’ arrival at autonomy was rejected by the Mogol with a snort of disbelief. There followed, in the pages Solanka wrote, a long dispute between the two men on the nature of life itself—life as created by a biological act, and life as brought into being by the imagination and skill of the living. Was life “natural,” or could the “unnatural” be said to be alive? Was the imagined world necessarily inferior to the organic one? Kronos was still a creative genius in spite of his downfall and long penurious concealment, and he proudly defended his cyborgs: by every definition of sentient existence, they had grown into full-fledged lifeforms. Like Homo faber, they were users of tools; like Homo sapiens, they reasoned and engaged in moral debate. They could attend to their ills and reproduce their species, and by shedding him, their maker, they had set themselves free. The Mogol rejected these arguments out of hand. A malfunctioning dishwasher did not become a busboy, he argued. By the same token, a rogue puppet was still a doll, a renegade robot was still a robot. This was not a fit direction for their discussions to take. Rather, it was for Kronos to recant his theories and then provide the Baburian authorities with the technological data required to bring the Peekay machines under control. If he refused, the Mogol added, changing the tenor of the conversation, he would of course be tortured and, if necessary, torn limb from limb.
The “recantation of Kronos,” his declaration that machines had no souls whereas man was immortal, was greeted by the deeply religious Baburian people as a mighty victory. Armed with information provided by the broken scientist, the antipodean army created new weapons, which paralyzed the cyborgs’ neurosystems and rendered them inoperative. (The term “killed” was forbidden; what was not alive could not be dead.) The Peekay forces fled in disarray, and a Baburian victory looked assured. The Dollmaker cyborg himself lay among the fallen. Too egotistical—too “consistent”—to have created any replicas of himself, the Dollmaker was still one of a kind; thus his character was erased with his termination. The only person who could have re-created him was Akasz Kronos, whose fate was obscure. Perhaps the Mogol killed him, even after his abject surrender; or perhaps he was blinded like Tiresias and permitted, by way of further humiliation, to wander the world, begging bowl in hand, “speaking the truth that no man would believe,” while from every quarter he heard tales of the collapse of his own great enterprises, of the reduction of the great Kronosian Puppet Kings, the sentient cyborgs from Rijk, the first machines ever to cross the frontier between mechanical entities and living beings, into piles of useless junk. And while nobody would now believe the truth that he had himself denied, he himself had no choice but to accept the reality of the catastrophe that his own cowardice, his lack of moral fortitude, had brought about.
At the eleventh hour, however, the tide turned. The Puppet Kings regrouped under a new, dual leadership. Zameen of Rijk and her cyborg counterpart the Goddess of Victory joined forces, like twin Ranis of Jhansi rising up against imperialist oppression, or like Little Brain in a new, double-trouble incarnation, leading her promised revolution. They used their combined scientific brilliance to build electronic shields against the new Baburian weapons. Then, with Zameen and the Goddess at their head, the Peekay army began a major offensive and invested the Mogol’s citadel. Thus began the Siege of Baburia, which would not end for a generation or more…
In the world of the imagination, in the creative cosmos that had begun with simple doll-making and then proliferated into this many-armed, multimedia beast, it wasn’t necessary to answer questions; far better to find interesting ways of rephrasing them. Nor was it necessary to end the story-indeed, it was vital to the project’s long-term prospects that the tale be capable of almost indefinite prolongation, with new adventures and themes being grafted onto it at regular intervals and new characters to sell in doll, toy, and robot form. The back-story was a skeleton that periodically grew new bones, the framework for a fictional beast capable of constant metamorphosis, which fed on every scrap it could find: its creator’s personal history, scraps of gossip, deep learning, current affairs, high and low culture, and the most nourishing diet of all-namely, the past. The ransacking of the world’s storehouse of old stories and ancient histories was entirely legitimate. Few Web users were familiar with the myths, or even the facts, of the past; all that was needed was to give the old material a fresh, contemporary twist. Transmutation was all. The Puppet Kings website went on-line and at once achieved and sustained a high level of “hits.” Comments flooded in, and the river of Solanka’s imagination was fed from a thousand streams. It began to swell and grow.
Because the work never settled, never stopped being a work in progress but remained in a condition of perpetual revolution, a degree of untidiness was inevitable. The histories of characters and places, even their names, sometimes changed as Solanka’s vision of his fictitious universe clarified and sharpened. Certain storyline possibilities turned out to be stronger than he had at first realized, and were greatly amplified. The Zameen/Goddess of Victory strand was the most important of these. In the initial conception, Zameen had simply been a beauty, not a scientist at all. Later, however, when Solanka-prompted, he had to concede, by Mila Milo-understood how important Zameen would be in the story’s climactic phase, he went back and added much material to her early life, turning her into Kronos’s scientific equal as well as his sexual and moral superior. Other avenues turned out to be blind alleys and were discarded. For example, in an early draft of the back-story, Solanka imagined that the “Galilean” figure captured by the Mogol was the cyborg Dollmaker, not the vanished Akasz Kronos. In this version the Dollmaker’s denial of his right to be called a “life-form,” his confession of his own inferiority, became a crime against himself and his own race. Later the Dollmaker escaped from his Baburian jailers, and when news of his “recantation” was spread by the Mogol’s propaganda machine with the aim of undermining his leadership, the cyborg hotly denied the accusations, announcing that he had not been the prisoner in question, that in fact h
is human avatar, Kronos, was the real traitor to the truth. Even though he discarded this version, Solanka retained a soft spot for it, and often wondered if he’d been wrong. Eventually, benefiting from the Web’s fondness for variora, he added the excised story to the site, as a possible alternate version of the facts.
The names Baburia and Mogol were late additions, too. Mogul of course came from “Mughal,” and Babur had been the first of the Mughal emperors. But the Babur of whom Malik Solanka had been thinking wasn’t an old dead king. He was the designated leader of the aborted “Indo-Lilly” parade-demonstration in New York, to whom, in Solanka’s opinion, Neela Mahendra had paid far too much attention. The parade had started out as a poor affair and ended up as a brawl. At the northwest corner of Washington Square, under the faintly interested scrutiny of assorted cold-drink salesmen, magic tricksters, unicyclists and cutpurses, one hundred or so men and a handful of women of Indian-Lilliputian origin assembled, their numbers augmented by American friends, lovers, spouses, members of the usual left groupuscules, token “solidarity cadres” from other diaspora—Indian communities in Brooklyn and Queens, and the inevitable demonstration tourists. Over a thousand in toto, the organizers claimed; around two hundred and fifty, said the police. The parallel demonstration of the “indigenous” Elbees had been even less well attended, and had shamefacedly dispersed without marching. However, groups of disgruntled and well-lubricated Elbee males had found their way to Washington Square to taunt the Indo-Lilly men and hurl sexual insults at the women. Scuffles broke out; the N.Y.P.D., looking amazed that so tiny an event could have generated such heat, moved in a few beats too late. As the crowd fled the advancing police officers, several quick knifings took place, none of them lethal. Within instants, the square was empty of demonstrators, except for Neela Mahendra, Malik Solanka, and a hairless giant, who stood stripped to the waist, holding a megaphone in one hand and in the other a wooden flagstaff bearing the new saffron-and-green flag of the proposed “Republic of Filbistan”—the FILB stood for “Free Indian Lilliput-Blefuscu” and the rest was added on because it sounded like a word from “home.” This was Babur, the young political leader who had traveled all the way from his distant islands to address the “rally,” and who now looked so forlorn, so shorn of purpose as well as hair, so unexpressed, that Neela Mahendra hastened to his side, leaving Solanka where he stood. When he saw Neela approaching, the young giant let go of the flagstaff, which thumped him on the head as it fell. He staggered but, to his considerable credit, remained upright. Neela was all solicitude, evidently believing that by giving Babur the full benefit of her beauty she could make up for his long, useless trip. And Babur did indeed brighten, and began, after a few moments, to address Neela as if she were the enormous and politically significant public meeting he had hoped for. He spoke of a Rubicon being crossed, of no compromise and no surrender. Now that the hard-won constitution had been abrogated and Indo-Lilly participation in the government of Lilliput-Blefuscu so shamefully terminated, he said, only extreme measures would suffice. “Rights are never given by those who have them,” he declaimed, “only taken by those in need.” Neela’s eyes brightened. She mentioned her television project, and Babur nodded gravely, seeing that something might be salvaged from the rubble of the day. “Come,” he said, taking her arm. (Solanka noted the ease with which she slipped her arm through her countryman’s.) “Come. We must discuss these things for many hours. There is much that needs urgently to be done.” Neela left with Babur without a backward glance.
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