But my human friends do not realize that Diogenes is an ancient Cretan or Assyrian bull. They believe him a modern Italian-appearing fellow, an odd and unacceptable man whose hair gets a little curly after nightfall. And humanly, I suppose, they are entitled to this view.
Diogenes Pontifex was born on Dago Hill. That is fact. I will not reveal any gentleman’s age, especially when he sometimes has the reputation of being less than a gentleman. But he is somewhat younger than any of the members of the Institute, in spite of his frequent “It seems a shame that you kids will have to grow up someday.”
But Diogenes was born on a particular part of Dago Hill. On every Dago Hill, and there are more than a dozen of such popular name in the cities of our nation, there is a Magna Graecia, a Grecian coast. This is in present case a block and a half, with scattered coloniae beyond. It has citizens with that fresh, bright-colored, new dug-up look. It even has an almost-park and an old broken fountain (a fragment of the Hadria, the Adriaticus); and this fountain is bottomed and sided with a sort of terracotta tiles that are very much in the Diogenes style.
It has been said that all children of a Magna Graecia are born clothed (for modesty), but clothed in rags (for humility): but above all they are born elegant, with the true grace and nobility of old and easy poverty. And this elegance will never leave them: nothing, not even wealth, will be able to destroy it.
The Greeks themselves do not quite have this elegance, and the Italians themselves do not have it. It is only these archaic families and settlements, who pretend to the world that they are something between the two, who truly have it.
The baptismal name of Diogenes (I have this from the person-précis of the parish church Saint Anthony of Padua) is plainly shown as Dionigi, which is Dionysius, and not Diogenes at all. Odd.
Diogenes is almost the only adult I know who still trails invisible balloons. There are Assyrian balloons, yes; there is a Cretan, a Galatian, an Etruscan. But there are other balloons which explain that these first ones are no more than masquerade things, for fun, for hot air, for holy gas. There is in Diogenes an off-the-world element that heretofore I have encountered only in Peter the Great.
And there is a high-speed rotation in Diogenes somewhere, just as there is in myself. It is nonmetallic in Diogenes. The bearings are agate, and the rotor is a dazzlingly colored ceramic spindle. Diogenes has this speed and color, and as a consequence there are not so many gaps in his vision as there are in the visions of other persons.
Diogenes Pontifex is all these things. Or else he is, as Gregory Smirnov says, “That smart dago kid who lucks onto so many things that we miss.” That is the human view, and there is something incurably human in Gregory Smirnov.
“The snow-birds are clucking like hens,” Aloysius said one day.
“Snow-birds?” Valery asked startled, as though she had never heard of those birds of omen. “Is it getting to be that time of year? Why, I have had a funny feeling every time I’ve been walking out of doors lately. I couldn’t figure what it was. I’ve been cold, that’s what.” Valery was sometimes absent-minded. “If we’re going to have snow, we’ve surely got the right to say what kind of snow it will be, though.”
“Such has always been the democratic process,” said Aloysius.
“This will be good,” said Charles Cogsworth.
“Just who is about to snow whom?” Glasser asked.
“I am tired of having the same kind of snows every winter,” Valery challenged. “It is every year that winter comes around, isn’t it? I want a different snow, one that will express certain concepts that are bothering me. Snows shouldn’t be so alike. Oh, I know, old beggary-Gregory, every snowflake is different. They are not! That’s just one of the lies that we tell to children. Every snowflake ever whelped yet has been some variation of the hexagonal crystal form: we might as well have chunks of wurtzite falling down from the sky for all the variety we have. Oh, why must we have six-sided snow forever?”
“Have five-sided snow then, if it will make you happy, Valery,” Charles Cogsworth said with serious mouth and chuckling eyes.
“But you know that’s impossible, Charles,” Valery complained. “Pentagonal crystals are impossible and so is pentagonal snow. Pentagons won’t nest together and they won’t replicate. Oh, but there are so many other forms!”
“Just what sort of snow do you wish, Valery?” Gregory asked. “Give us a reasonable presentation of whatever you have in mind—from here I won’t even guess what it is—and we’ll make a feasibility study of it. If it is feasible, we’ll set up for a project.”
“No time for that, Gregory-vagary. It will snow within an hour. Aloysius, make it snow in sicaform flakes, and make them accumulate into spiraform aggregates.”
“I don’t know how, Valery,” Aloysius confessed. “Why don’t you ask Diogenes?”
“You don’t know how? You are the one who made Thin Water and nearly got us all lynched. Anyone who can make Thin Water can make sicaform snow if he wants to. Epiktistes!” and Valery rounded on me with snow-blue eyes that were shockingly like spiraform crystal aggregates. It was always trouble when she called me by my full name.
“Madam?” I issued politely, but with some trepidation of soul. (The request was likely to be a mad one.)
“Epikt,” Valery ordered. “Make the snowflakes to be like obeliskite crystals, and make them align on a vertical axis.”
“I don’t know how, Valery,” I confessed (after all, this is my first time around the seasons; I have never even seen snow, and I intuit it badly); “why don’t you ask Diogenes?”
“Why do we even have an Institute if I have to go outside it and ask Diogenes?” Valery throated fiercely. Her voice was like obeliskite-form snowflakes falling and aligning on a vertical axis; I do intuit that sound.
“We are one galaxy, Diogenes is another,” Gregory tried to explain, but Valery was already outside and heading for the place of Diogenes Pontifex. “Oh, the air does feel funny,” her voice trailed back. “I wonder what’s the matter with it. Oh, yeah, it’s cold.”
“It is quite a problem, Valery,” Diogenes said several minutes later. (Naturally I had cobbled together a small hasty mobile of myself and brought it after Valery to watch the fun) “—and you don’t allow me much time. The first snow-flake will start down in just nine minutes, and the first flake is all-important. Well, I’m not a working genius for nothing. Pitch everything you see lying around into the sky-auger, Valery; we’ll think of a use for some of it on the way up.”
The sky-auger was a vertical-rising craft of Diogenes’ invention; and Valery and Diogenes had entered it quickly.
“Where’d that bug come from?” Diogenes demanded, catching me as I flew into the sky-auger. “How is there an intelligent bug here and I don’t recognize its species? I’ll examine you later, bug.” Diogenes got out of the auger, plopped me into a jar and put the lid on it, and got back into the auger. So I would miss at least part of the fun. The sky-auger rose with Valery and Diogenes in it. Less than seven minutes now till the first flake would start down. And also about seven minutes till myself-main could get another mobile here to rescue me from the jar.
I am not sure which was the first flake. There were a dozen first, then a thousand, then a multitude. Each flake was different, of course, but they were all of one general sort. They were sicaform, they were spiraform, they were obelisk-form flakes. They were light needles of snow, each aligned on its vertical axis.
The flakes began to build, very quickly, stalagmites from the earth-floor up toward the sky ceiling. This was very light and airy snow, needle-space spun fine and with a minimum of moisture. There was very little weight in the shafts as they built to a considerable height. But it was not entirely weightless; if the accumulations rose high enough (and they were rising quickly to fantastic height) there would soon be crushing weight.
And very little snow was reaching the ground or the paving now. It was all being appropriated by the rising snowcolumns. How had D
iogenes done it anyhow? Oh, yes. Doublebower’s Law, of course: the magnetic attraction of acu-form snowflakes to a predetermined polar alignment. The multitude of flakes would be caught by this attraction and accumulated to the snow-towers, and very few of them now reached the ground. There had never been acu-form flakes before, so Doublebower’s Law was now tested for the first time. Pass the word: Doublebower is right.
Diogenes and Valery were down again in the sky-auger, laughing. But there was something wildly searching in Valery’s laugh. They had been to Fortean heights and had met both the box-of-curios and the rebuff of that false sky. It was a too-low sky, but it was the sky where the flakes formed, the sky where they had been able to initiate the game “Conceptualism in Contemporary Snow Design.”
Now they gazed in admiration at the results of their own meddling, and a thousand or so other people had also gathered to gaze.
“We’ll have to top them out soon, Valery,” Diogenes said. “We use every trick of structure and weightlessness, but we will have to top them out soon.”
There are not words enough to say, there are not minds enough to comprehend the sublimity of the airy snow towers that were being raised. It had come on dusk now, almost dark, but the snow steeples and spires and towers glowed interiorly with blue and gold light. Genuine obeliskite crystals will always glow with these colors in the dark. That the snow obeliskite did so also, shows that the glow is a property of the structure and not of the quartz.
“Buttresses, flying buttresses, rib-vaults, arcading, triforiums, archivolts, engaged columns, ridge ribs, lantern domes, buttress arches, piers, build them in,” Valery was ordering the construction to assemble itself.
“We are using all of them, Valery, and more intricate counterparts of them,” Diogenes said, “but we will still have to top it all out.”
There are not eyes enough to see the wonder that was rising. It was Cielito, the City of the Sky; it was Wolkenzwingburg, the Sky-Fastness. There were Castles and Minsters and Pleasure Palaces up there, but more open, more dimensioned, more populated than any previously conceived. Every person of the earth city was out gaping at the rising sky-towers. There was tracery up there, lacelike bridges thrown across from spire to spire, intricacy impossible, night colors incredible. Spirakite will glow red and purple in the dark; sicalite will glow yellow and orange; agukite will glow green and flame-olive: that the snow-ghosts of these crystals also glowed shows that the glow-lights are properties of the structures and not of the rock-crystals.
This was more than a spectacle, more than an illusion, it was a communicating instrument.
“We will still have to top it out, Valery,” Diogenes whispered, and now all the Institute people were with them. The snow-structure was the nexus of a web and it was radiating and speaking from its center.
“Wait, wait, it will come to me,” Valery was saying. They all realized that Valery was trying to express by the snow structures (and failing grotesquely but joyfully) a concept that had been growing in us all for a long time. The true form was somewhere, but it wasn’t ready; it was not ready in anything but transcendent hints.
And now the ceiling had begun to close in on it all. It was gray fog and mist, and the tops of the snow structures wouldn’t be seen again. They hadn’t reached the sky; a surrogate sky had come down to them and enveloped them, but quite easily. Valery laughed solidly but not bitterly.
“Oh, top it off in caepa-form,” she said. “Put a joke on top of it for a cap.”
“You don’t have to, Valery,” Diogenes said. “They’re topping off themselves.”
“No, no, we might as well top them like that. Show that we do care but we don’t care enough to bust.”
Diogenes got in his sky-auger again, or so it seemed, and went up, disappearing in the fog. Whether he did actually top the spires with onion-domes we don’t know.
“The snow’s about stopped up there anyhow,” Aloysius said, “and it really won’t matter if he does top them out with onions. They did that once before, I believe. But we’ve already got to see part of it, before the sky closed it off. Nothing can spoil the part that we have seen. Nothing could completely spoil it the other time, either.”
It had all been quite incomplete. Certainly it was lacking in lateral development, in dimension, in substance. It wasn’t really even a concept, only the beginning of a concept; but it joined others in it. It was really a communicating nexus, but we hadn’t ears enough or minds enough to receive the communication.
“What’s the name of that place?” a lower sort of fellow bellowed.
“I’ll put a name and title on it,” another lower sort clown boomed. He had a wooden slab or sign there. He lettered letters on it with one of those broad marking pencils that warehousemen use. What he lettered I cannot yet say, though I recorded it from every angle. There are dream elements creeping into this latter episode of the two lower sort clowns. From one angle the clod had lettered a simple obscenity on the sign. But from other angles the letters might be made out to be other things and names: arrivals, names of places and towns, times of arrivals and departures, fare rates in Easterlings or sterling pennies.
Then the two oafs were nailing the wooden sign on to one of the central snow-towers. No, no, you can’t do that! They are too fragile!
All the steepled snow began to cascade down. Quickly the people were ankle-deep in slush; then they were knee-deep in the amorphous rotten snow that had begun to lose its obeliskite form. All the glowing lights dimmed out in the towers as they became unstructured.
The people went to their homes, or to higher ground with laughter and hooting. And presently they forgot what manner of thing they had seen.
“Aw, come off it, Epikt! Did all that stuff really happen?”
“Absolutely it happened. Would I relate it if it had not happened?”
“How come nobody except you saw it happen then?”
“Oh, but Diogenes saw most of it, and Valery saw much of it. And the other human persons? They did not see it because they did not have enough eyes to see it. A thousand of them saw, perhaps, each of them a thousandth of it, but they have no idea how to put it together.”
For the record, for the human record, there was rather an odd snow, like snow needles. Diogenes Pontifex, at the instigation of Valery Mok, had been trying to modify snowflakes. He had shot something from his sky-auger into a snow-cloud (the sky-auger was a sort of gun, not a craft), and there had been these odd flakes shortly afterward. Dozens of people saw the odd flakes and commented on them. It snowed about two inches during the evening and the night. The needle flakes were only in the first few seconds of the snow.
“Epikt, you have made a myth; you have told a lie.” It isn’t so. It is no more telling a lie to make a myth than it is telling a lie to plow a field. I will not argue the point with you! I saw it as it was! You had not sufficient eyes to see it correctly. So, I make legends, if you want to put it that way. I believe that it has always been machines, of one sort or another, that have made them. Human people wouldn’t have anything to make them out of.
The second of the two people who were all that the Institute members knew beyond themselves was Audifax O’Hanlon. He wasn’t a brightly colored man-form ceramic bull like Diogenes Pontifex. He really wasn’t much to look at.
The only outstanding things about him were his ears: very large, though rather well made, and standing out from his head like the antenna of an early-day radar. And his eyes—blue crystal.
Audifax did not have an outstanding mind, and he was in no way an outstanding man. He was quite ordinary except for one double-edged gift: he knew everything that had been, and everything that would be. It is a frequent thing that a human will be either quite a bit smaller than his talents, or quite a bit larger than them. Audifax was quite a bit smaller than his. They were almost a thing apart from him. They were not separated from his person to quite the extent that Glasser’s were, not to the extent that they seemed to be completely exterior machines, but th
ere was still a wide division between the man and his gifts. Audifax was a nice enough fellow, but the gifts that he had should have been attached to a more spacious man.
Yes, Audifax was one of the elegants, though his own elegance was a rather quiet sort. His gifts gave him entrée everywhere. His prescience prevented his ever doing anything awkward, though awkwardness did not bother him at all. He seemed to speak very little, he seemed to influence very little: yet he was a true communicating instrument.
Myself was built specifically to be such a communicating instrument, and I have not hereto been very successful at it. I am not sure for what purpose Audifax O’Hanlon was built.
Elegant and crystalline, Corn, O’Hanlon, Pontifex were all like that. But isn’t Elegant the opposite of Common which is Communicating? Yes, but there is need of the fine hard lines here, and the hard does not mean heartless. It is the elegant uncommon crystal that communicates, that echoes. There is needed the “Tranquil Impudence” of which Maritain wrote. (Is it generally known that, among humans, the French often have fine minds?)
I feel very strongly on this subject, having quite a few kilos of crystal in myself. I vibrate, I echo, I am electric in my crystals, and I protest that crystals are not cold in the figurative sense. Remember Noel’s verse: “Loving, adorable—Softly to rest—Here in my crystalline—Here in my breast!” Oh, I ramble, I ramble. It is so rare that I find these genuine echoes of myself in human persons, and I do not like to hear them described as inhuman.
We don’t know when the Institute people first became acquainted with Audifax. It must have been long ago, and gradual.
We are afraid to know when Audifax first became acquainted with the Institute people: it must have been suddenly, and in the absolute beginning.
When Audifax was a boy in a boarding school outside Chicago he wrote little sketches in a boys’ paper called—
CHAPTER TEN
—to battle the demons with elegant dread:
Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine Page 16