The city in which he was raised on Dago Hill was not a large city. It was a medium city, a border city in a border state. Just off Dago Hill in a sort of boondocks was Hillbilly Flats; and a little off from both in a scraggly area atop the river bluffs was an old mixed and often desecrated cemetery. It was there that the boys of several sorts used to come on Allhalloween, and it was there that the older boys played bone-rattling tricks on the younger. There was one grave of an old Confederate soldier that was cracked and gaped, and the boys had driven a section of rainspout down into the grave to use for a talking tube.
“Halloo,” they would call down it every Halloween night, “is there anybody down there?” And there would come the noise of a creaky stirring, and a cracked voice would wheeze up out of the grave: “Eh—is it time? Has the South riz again?”
“No, not yet,” the boys would holler back.
“Ah, well, I’ll bide me another year then,” the cracked voice would sound.
This really happened. I have come across it in the précis of more than fifty men who witnessed it as boys. Some of these are respectable men. One of them is a judge. Their authentic memories are to be trusted.
There was another grave there with a hole going down into it like a big rat hole or a skunk hole. This grave was right at the edge of the river bluff and was undermined by boys’ caves in the face of the bluff. It was part of a grisly Halloween night initiation that a young boy must lie down flat with his face in the dirt and put his hand and arm down in the hole as far as he could reach.
“Go ahead,” the older boys would urge the younger. “It’s only a dead man down there. How can a dead man hurt you?”
So the young boy would lie with his face in the dirt and his arm as far down as he could reach. But an older boy, from a cave in the face of the bluff, would be able to grip the wrist of the little boy and almost pull him down into the narrow hole. I have read the shocking and killing terror from the précis of small boys who have gone through this as I have never read terror in any other précis anywhere. Indeed, one small boy really did die of fright, but he was sickly and of a weak heart anyhow.
So it was till one year when the older boys said, “Let’s get that smart little Dago kid,” and Diogenes Pontifex was chosen for the initiation. What things I find in the Diogenes person-précis for this encounter I have never found in any other précis anywhere either.
Tall terror? No, absolutely not. It was laughter like nothing else ever recorded. Joy such as you could hardly believe, sense of encounter that still leaves one reeling. What matter if a devil-hand did pull him all the way down the hole to hell? Could not Diogenes confound the devils and have his own high time in doing it? Had they wisdom and knowledge to match his own of seven years? What harm could death or hell inflict on one who had the ceramic sheen of Diogenes Pontifex? There were certain things that Diogenes was always sure of from earliest childhood: that he was smarter than all the devils in hell (he sure hadn’t gotten himself into a jam like they had); that nothing at all could hurt him except himself.
Diogenes was disappointed when he found out that it was only a trick of the older boys; but I can hear his first laughter yet in my mechanical memory.
And now Diogenes was trying to extract patterns and shapes from the Sepulchers of Saints in that same old cemetery and in the new cemetery that adjoins it. And naturally he knew which were the saints, whether or not the names of them were available. The residue of every saint will be an authentic piece of the Shape Itself. The residues of those who are not saints will be not quite authentic pieces of the Shape. Or so is the theory.
Diogenes extracted pieces from old buried Indians and Negroes, from roustabouts, from soldiers, from unclaimed and unnamed dead. He also made extractions from better-estimated and better-known graves. He achieved more than a dozen valid pieces of the Shape. Their full value is not known yet.
Elsewhere in the glob-form that is the world, Charles Cogsworth and Aloysius Shiplap had gone out from a near shore. They studied the trails of paddle-fish. The paddle-fish will veer around obstacles and emptinesses that are not there. The men wished to discover the shape of their veering and the fish-concept of the obstacles. Very likely those emptinesses were not empty to the paddle-fish. Their trails, certainly, made strange designs.
Later, Cogsworth and Aloysius caught and studied flying fish and the micalike membranes of their wings when held obliquely to the sun. There were more patterns there than in any kaleidoscope. One flying fish had evil humor in his eyes, and Aloysius slit him open quickly with his own evil humor. Oooh, I did not think that Aloysius could slit a fish that fast! He is one up on me and I am undone completely.
“This one is too fishy to be a fish,” Aloysius said (I will remember forever that he is very quick of hand, I will not make this mistake again), “we will see whether he is too fishy to eat.”
They tried it but they couldn’t. It was neither fish nor flesh. It was plastic and mechanism and gell-cell. It was an extension of myself, Epikt. And Aloysius is one up on this machine.
When it was dusk, Cogsworth and Aloysius studied the patterns of the fluorescence of sea-lice. These were green cloud-shapes under the dark water, sparkling and snapping with wet jewel-fire, tumbling in agony of light and struggle, forging shapes and smashing them, glittering like constellations and mocking all patterns. There was always green anger and defiance in the sea-lice, flawed grandeur and false agony. How could inchling-lice have true grandeur and agony?
Ah, well, how can inchling-humans have such?
I must have had a blackout. I have, apparently, made a mobile unbeknownst to myself. It has been around the various groups a good part of this critical day and the Institute people have come to call it the goofmobile. But how could it be goofy if it is a projection and mobile of myself?
It is a long-faced man-form, an angular Angle, strawhaired and gray-eyed, and it says that its name is Easterwine. I must have made it from the philological speculations that are bubbling within me, but Easterwine is supposed to be a place and not a person. When I call the form long-faced I do not mean to call him solemn. He had a long-faced smile, a large and joyous nose, a more than archaic gown, and a mistiness of appearance. He is not of high resolution. This means that he is either a mobile of myself, the most likely explanation since I have mobiles all over the place, or a hallucination. He makes healing signs with his hands, and the only words he speaks are “Let some sick man be brought.”
He is around all the locations in the afternoon while the Institute people are trying to gather data on shape. Gregory and Glasser and the Late Cecil Corn claim that they cannot see this Easterwine. They say that I am having hallucinations. A machine having hallucinations? Oh, I suppose so, but to be called hallucinatory by a genuine hallucination (the Late Cecil Corn) hurts. But I know that Valery can see this Easterwine wraith, and I suspect that Aloysius can.
Diogenes Pontifex both sees him and knows him. That, however, is almost an endorsement in reverse. “He used to be an abbot at St. Peter’s monastery in Kent,” Diogenes said, “but that was a long time ago.”
“Let some sick man be brought,” said the apparition Easterwine, and he made healing motions with his hands. Illumination came into my dense head. I record the healing motions of his hands, the shape and pattern that they draw. It may be the closest thing that we have yet to the shape itself. We look on snakes’ bellies for the shape of it. Why should we disdain the hands of a hallucination who was once abbot of St. Peter’s in Kent?
Easterwine disappears to my own eyes. He is like no other moblie I have ever made, if I have made him.
And meanwhile again, back in the high meadows in another area of the glob-form, Valery and Glasser were studying the spark-worms in the twilight. Twenty of the spark-worms are not so large as one match head. Two hundred of them would scarcely give the light of one match. But the billions of them in the high meadows and pastures sent out billows and sheets and waves of light.
A design of li
ght would be built by the spark-worms in one draw. It would be answered by those in a second draw, by those on a hilltop, by those in a tangled ravine. Running fire crested and broke, skipped over streams, ran up farther hills. Glowing pulsations shined and throbbed. There was sound or imagined sound in the pulsations, a static knocking or sputtering, a clamor to get in somewhere, or to get out.
Thirty thousand of the sparkies blinked together to make one beacon. Thirty thousand others, five hundred yards away, answered with a second beacon. And then the two signal lights began to blink together in perfect unison. There were other strange things. The spark-worms mapped out the sky-constellations above them and did it with seeming of depth that was not apparent in the constellations themselves.
Valery and Glasser recorded the patterns of the sparkies. They recorded the patterns of their own reactions to them. The shape of it all was certainly curious, but most curious of all was the timbre of that shape. For there is an interesting and almost frightening thing about these spark-worms:
They are blind. They will never see their own light nor know that they make it. Surely here, if anywhere, is blind pattern. But should their lack of eyes make them to be of unusual pattern?
Valery and Glasser went down from the high pastures, through night music, to the town. Charles Cogsworth and Aloysius Shiplap came up from the coast. They were to meet that night, all of them, with Gregory Smirnov the director in the building of the Institute for Impure Science.
The members of the Institute intended to solve—
CHAPTER TWELVE
These are the worlds all tattered and torn,
And hot-cakes made for the still unborn.
—The members of the Institute intended to solve another of their most important problems this night.
“We are met here to further a work of the Late Cecil Corn,” the director Gregory Smirnov stated pompously. The look on Cecil Corn’s face was something that I cannot describe. It is the only time, I believe, that Gregory was ever one up on Cecil and he was enjoying it as he puffed on a short fat cigar.
A man of Gregory’s stature could hardly sacrifice quality in his cigars, but he had had to sacrifice length. Briefly, Gregory was no longer able to buy fine cigars and he was seldom able to cadge them now. (The only money the Institute has now is from me, and I like to keep the members a little lean and avid and thinking.) Aloysius Shiplap, however, had built a quality-cigar-finder for Gregory. It indicated the length and state of health and location of fine cigar butts (it would not register on anything except quality pieces), and was built into the ornate head of Gregory’s cane. Gregory collected quite a few butts on his daily walks, in gutters, in weed patches, in receptacles. He retrieved them with dignity and he smoked them with dignity. Gregory was a gentleman through and through.
“Cecil Corn started so many things so brilliantly for us,” Gregory continued, cocking an eye at the seat where Cecil would have been visible if he were visible, “and, we are wont to say, he died so tragically at the height of his powers. I say that he played us a rat trick. He never finished any of his projects. He couldn’t finish them. He promised finally that he would wrap up eight of them in one week, two on a Saturday. He couldn’t do it; his only way out was to die. Bless his memory, the whiskery rat! And yet, an Institute has to have a ‘Late’ eminence for legend’s sake, and he serves.
“This project of the Late Cecil Corn was to determine the shape of the universe. Cecil said that it had to be a communicating and re-entrant sphere. He said that if he did find the shape to be re-entrant, he would re-enter and tell us about it. He did not return—Valery says that he has not even left—so I doubt that the shape is re-entrant. I believe that it is a sphere, but if it is a communicating sphere we seem to have a lot of trouble communicating that fact. In a way, we ourselves have gone around a sphere in our quest and have come back reassured to our starting place. Most of us began with the idea that the universe was a sphere, and we return steadfast in the belief that it is an incontrovertible sphere.”
“What is an incontrovertible sphere?” asked Charles Cogsworth, the unoutstanding husband of Valery Mok. “I’ll controvert it if I can, if it doesn’t talk to me.”
The Institute for Impure Science, as well as other things in the world, had come onto skinny and shabby days. Appropriations for Impure Science had fallen off. Except for certain confidence games devised by Aloysius Shiplap and by myself Epiktistes the Ktistec machine, the Institute could hardly have survived. The director Gregory disapproved of bilking the poor public, or even the rich public, but he didn’t disapprove as loudly as he once had. The power consumption of myself, Epikt, was enormous and had to be paid for (you don’t think I was going to pay for it so long as I was working for them, do you?), and all of the members had to eat and to keep up appearances.
“It’s a flawed sphere, at least,” Glasser said. “All thanks for the flaws. They’re the only things in it that speak to me.”
“There are so many things missing out of it that it seems unnatural,” Valery proposed, “but I think it’s natural for things to be unnatural…. Oh, oh, Charles said that he’d tie a knot in my tongue the next time I said something that sounded like that.”
“From the evidence of the Cosmo people, the universe has at least fifty different local shapes,” Aloysius put in. “We cannot consider all the evidence of the Cosmo people, though. They require one entire world (actually only a large asteroid) to store their evidence on all the worlds, and even so they have not explored nearly all the localities. Oh, our own galaxy and our own cluster can be shaped and sized as flat spheres, but it isn’t so everywhere. Gravity and light-force and cosmic hysteresis indicate that the universe is somewhere quoit-form, sometimes oyster-form—”
“Both are distortions of spheres,” said Gregory, lighting a longer butt from a shorter.
“Why is shape so important?” Glasser asked. He has been asking it a lot lately.
“As was shown by our experiments with obeliskite-form snow,” I stuck in my oar (I’ve never understood the exact applicability of that phrase), “the shape and the structure determine the characteristics of anything. The material, the content, has nothing to do with it. Or rather, the shape and the structure are, ultimately, the material and the content. Now let me explain—”
“Aw, put it in a bucket, Epikt,” Aloysius said. “To continue, in some places the universe is torus-shaped, sometimes it has the shape of an outer-space half-shell, or open ball, or spherical shell, or annulus, or chiroteca, or sub-set manifold, or jordan cylinder, or sella, or involute. Sometimes it is a haggis-shell, or batilium, or rete, or cavum, or inner-space cuneus. Mostly, I suspect, it is a cancelli system.”
“Well put, Aloysius,” said the Late Cecil Corn.
“People, we know that space is not of uniform shape,” Aloysius Shiplap continued, “and our idea of ourselves as people is predicated on a uniform shape. Therefore we will have to rethink the whole idea of people. If shape and substance are the same things, then perhaps communication or liaison and people are the same things. Why ever it should fall to a clutch of solitary uncommunicating people like ourselves to ask whether communication is identical with people I do not know. We must discover the real, the un-uniform shape of people. We will learn that there is no such thing as absolute people. We know that our light and our gravity are not uniform, that there are gaping holes in our space, and consequently there are gaping holes in ourselves.”
“Isn’t holes in space just empty space?” Valery asked.
“God Himself must answer on the last day for giving speech to women!” Aloysius moaned. “No, they are not the same thing, Valery. Children and women often go wrong on their thinking there. Most space is empty space, it is true. But a hole in space is not space at all, it is not nothing even, it is simply a hole in space. Light, for instance, cannot cross a hole in space, but it can cross empty space. Gravity cannot cross a hole in space, nor could we ever be aware of the hole except by inference.”
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“Well, we’ve certainly gone as far as we can go with it,” said Gregory, scorching his nose as he lit another stub. “Only out of honor to the Late Cecil Corn have we gone this far. We fed all conventional and rational data of shape and pattern and simultaneity and sequence into Epikt, a really fantastic bulk of data. We asked him to show us the shape of the universe based on all this data. And what did you show us then, Epikt?”
“A rotten apple,” I issued. “Really, there was more hole than apple.”
“And a rotten apple is nothing but a slightly distorted sphere!” Gregory triumphed. “That should have settled it, but you bleaters continued to bleat. ‘No, there isn’t any pattern looking at it straight,’ you all said, ‘but maybe there is a pattern if we look at it crooked. Let us take it from all grotesque angles.’
“So, to the vast bulk of the stew already simmering, we add in a salt-pinch of all manner of human humor-madness, and the garlic of Epikt’s own peculiar antics. The stew should bark like prairie dogs from its very aroma now. I permitted you to gather irregular and ridiculous data that might have bearing on shape and pattern. I blush for the Institute to hear of the things that you have indulged in. But I tell you that the universe is clearly a sphere, and all the slight irregularities of the slightly irregular Aloysius cannot make it anything else. The universe is a sphere, for the sphere is the most perfect of shapes.”
“The sphere is not the most perfect shape,” Valery insisted. “It is only the most selfish shape. Take away a sphere, and—’what an abominable leave!’ as a pool-player might say. Spheres will not meet together, they will not stack, they have no consideration for others. How they communicate is completely beyond me. We here are spheres ourselves and that is what is the matter with us. The only tolerable sphere is the perpetually exploding sphere.”
Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine Page 20