Novelties Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction

by John Crowley

  She said she didn’t object to any of that. She felt herself to be in training precisely to do that work, to maintain the illusion that act-field theory governs human life in the same way that axioms govern a mathematical system. She felt (Hare remembered her uplifted face, almost aglow in the dark common room, long after lights-out) that there could be no higher a task than to dedicate oneself to that work, which was cadre’s work within the Revolution. Act-field theory dissolved social truisms like an acid, but it itself could never be dissolved; its works were its truth, the happiness of the world was its truth, the Revolution was its truth.

  Hare listened, warmed by her certainty, by the strength of her thought; and he smiled, because he knew what she did not know. He had been where she couldn’t go. She was no mathematician; she had not, as he had, just completed a multiplane ellipsoidal simplex and entered it onto the central virtual act-field and seen—he saw it, saw it like a landscape full of unceasing activity—the interior of the Revolution’s data base, virtually as limitless as the actual act-field it reflected: and then saw it, at the bidding of his program, turn and look at itself.

  How could he communicate that mystery? Ever since, as a schoolboy, he had learned that there are problems—in topology, in chaos description, in the projection of fractals—problems with true and verifiable solutions that only computers can construct, and only other computers verify, Hare had known how it was that computers could truly contain a virtual act-field, an image of the world larger than he could access within himself. He could put real questions about the world to the computers and receive real answers, answers not he nor any human mind could predict, answers only the computers themselves could prove true.

  There was an act-field, and a theory by which it could be constructed. Just as Hare knew there was an interior in the young woman who sat beside him, which he could apprehend through her words and through the strength of her thought touching him as he listened and looked, an interior bounded by the planes of her pale temples and the warm body real beneath her clothes of Blue, so he knew truth to be contained within the interiors of the Revolution’s computers: truth both unbounded and boundless, endless by definition and somehow kind.

  He remembered that feeling. He remembered it, but he no longer felt it. He could not ever, knowing what he knew, think as that woman had, that act-field theory was a lie or a kind of trick. He imagined, guiltily, what a relief it might be to think so, but he could not. But act-field theory no longer seemed to him kind, as it once had. It seemed to be hurting him, and on purpose.

  But if act-field theory underlay the Revolution, and the Revolution could not hurt him or anyone, then act-field theory could not hurt him.

  He sat back, his hands in his lap, unwilling to touch the keys of the composer, reasoning with himself—tempted to reason with himself, as a man with a wound is tempted to probe it, pull at the scab, pick at the hurt flesh.

  He did not need to feel these things, he told himself. He did not need to write an introduction to his manual. It needed none. Of course any part of act-field theory could be introduced by an explanation of all of it, but no part needed such an introduction. The project knew that. Certainly the project knew that. In fact the project had given him this job precisely because it would not require him to think about the whole of act-field theory, but only about the simple mechanics of its application. And yet the fact that he could no longer think clearly about the whole (which was why he was here now before this antiquated composer) meant that when he was confronted with this simple introduction, he felt like a man confronted with a small symptom, not in itself terrible, not even worth considering, of a fatal systemic disease.

  Perhaps, though, the project had thought of all that; perhaps it had put him here, in this cubicle, and presented him with the concrete, the explicit and fearful consequences of act-field theory, to punish him for no longer being able to think about the theory itself: for betraying, through no fault of his own, the Revolution. No fault of his own: and yet he felt it to be his fault.

  No, that was insane. If the Revolution was not always kind, it was never vindictive, never; for a heterarchy to be vindictive was a contradiction in terms: the Revolution could not be if it could be vindictive.

  Unless there was a flaw in the theory that underlay the Revolution, act-field theory, which made heterarchy in the world conceivable, which made the integral social calculus possible and therefore all the daily acts and motions of the human world, including his sitting here before his unwritable manual.

  But there could be no flaw in act-field theory. Hare knew that as well as he knew that he was alive. Act-field theory proved that all possible disproofs of act-field theory were themselves provable parts of act-field theory, just as were all other acts. It was not even possible for Hare to consider act-field theory without the act of his considering having been accounted for by the theory.

  All possible strategies for avoiding paradox within act-field theory were also parts of the theory; they were acts the theory defined. Just as his sitting here pursued by paradox was defined and accounted for.

  Hare had entered into an infinite-regression fugue; the taste of infinity was in his mouth like metal. That which had freed the world held Hare like a vise, like a cell in which a madman runs eternally, beating his head first on one wall, then the other.

  Hare got permission to go and visit Eva and his son in the country. It was never hard to get such permission, but it was often hard to find transportation for such a purely personal trip. Hare’s cadre status was no help; in fact it was considered not quite right for cadre to be seen traveling for private reasons. It didn’t look serious; it could seem like unearned privilege and might be offensive to the people. Hare learned of a convoy of trucks that was taking young people out of the city to help with the harvest, and he was promised a ride on one of these.

  When Willy returned from his night shift, he shook Hare awake, and as Hare, yawning and blinking, dressed, Willy undressed and climbed into the warmth Hare had left in the hollow of the bed. Hare went out into the empty, frosted streets, still tasting the dream from which Willy had awakened him.

  Hare wondered if there were different names for different kinds of dream. This dream had been the kind where you seem to be telling a story to someone, and at the same time experiencing the story you are telling. Hare had been telling a story to Willy, a shameful and terrible secret that he had always kept from him, but which he had to confess to him now because Willy wanted to play. He had to confess how when he was a boy—and here he seemed not only to remember the episode but to experience it as well—when he was a boy, he had cut off his penis. He had done it deliberately, for what seemed like sufficient and even sensible reasons; he had kept the cut-off penis in a box. He saw himself opening the box in which he had kept it, and looking at it: it was erect but dead-looking, white, the veins in it pale. As he looked at it, the dream rising away from him, he realized how stupid he had been—how horribly stupid to have done this irrevocable thing that could never, ever be repaired, why, why had he done it—and as he contemplated the horror, Willy’s hand awoke him. Relief of the purest kind washed over him, the dreadful burden fell away: it was all a dream, he hadn’t done it at all. He grasped Willy’s hand and laughed. Willy laughed, too. “Just a dream,” Hare said.

  Hare walked through the streets to the truck depot, shivering, feeling alternately the horror of the dream and the relief of waking. He had been distant with Willy lately: he ought to stop that, there was no reason for it.

  Young men and women, students and younger cadre, filled the open trucks, mostly in Blue, mostly laughing and pleased at the prospect of a day in the country. Hare found the driver who had promised him a ride, and he was helped into the truck by several hands. The convoy started its engines, and as dawn threw long bars of sun between the buildings, they drove out of the city. The young people in Hare’s truck began to sing, their strong high young voices clear, and the truck’s engine a bass accompaniment to t
heir song. It was stirring.

  More somber, across the bridge, were the wide tracts of old city suburbs, long straight streets crossed by dirt roads where pools of water colored with oil stood in the truck ruts. Children, who perhaps belonged to the flowerets of modular housing growing over the dumps and shacks and abandoned factories, looked up to watch them pass. The young people stopped singing and began to find places within the truck’s bed where they could sit comfortably through the long ride. Some opened books or journals they had brought. Some of the women lit cigarettes, though none of the men did.

  Almost all the boys Hare had known who smoked cigarettes gave them up at a certain age, once out of school, but many women didn’t. Women who smoked were of a certain kind, Hare thought; or at least they all seemed to roll and smoke their cigarettes in the same way, with the same set of gestures. Like that one, sitting with another out of the wind in the shelter of the cab: tall, lean, her hair cut short and carelessly, she used her cigarette in a curt, easy way, dangling it in her long hand that rested over her knee, flicking it now and then with her thumbnail. She rolled it within her fingers to lift it to her lips, drew deeply though it had grown almost too short to hold, and gracefully, forcefully, two-fingered it away over the truck’s side, at the same time dismissing the smoke from herself through mouth and nostrils. The hard way she smoked seemed like the mark of a sisterhood; her friend beside her smoked in much the same way, though not tempered by the grace, the young eyes, or the kind smile that this one paid to Hare when she caught him studying her. Hare returned the smile, and the woman, still smiling, looked away, running her hand through her hair.

  Hare laughed, enjoying the way what she did to mask herself, the smoking, revealed her to him. Young: when she was older, and more practiced, it wouldn’t reveal her, but just now, in this morning, it did. Perched on the truck’s scuppers, among youth—among the unmarked who desired so much to be marked, and in their desire, showing their tender just-born selfhoods the more cleanly, the more tartly to his senses—Hare for a moment felt how well after all the world is put together, and how well the people in it fit into it: a seamless act-field into which, no matter what fears he felt, Hare too fitted: into which even his fears of not fitting also fitted in the end.

  He thought of Eva.

  The truck left him off at a bare crossroads, where it turned toward the broad garden lands. He walked the two or three miles to the cadre crèche where Eva lived and worked, and where their son was growing up: three years old now. Hare had with him some books for Eva—she always complained there weren’t enough, or the ones she could get weren’t interesting—and a gift for his son, which Willy had made: a nesting set of the five regular geometric solids, all inside a sphere. They could be taken apart, and with some trouble, put back together again.

  It had never been the case that anyone, any bureau or person or committee, ever forbade a marriage or some permanent arrangement between Eva and Hare. There was no committee or person who could have done that. Eva believed from the beginning, though, that such a barrier existed; it made her at once fearful and angry. Hare couldn’t convince her that, whatever stories she may have heard, whatever rumors circulated, cadre weren’t forbidden to regularize affairs like theirs. “They don’t want it,” Eva would say. “They don’t care about anyone’s happiness, so long as the work gets done. They never think about anything but the work.” And Hare could not make her believe that, in the very nature of the Revolution, there was no “they,” there could not be a “they” of the kind she feared and hated.

  Certainly there was a tedious set of procedures that had to be gone through, but none of them were restrictive, Hare insisted, they were only informational. Many different people, yes, had to be informed; Hare and Eva’s plans had to be passed outward into wider and wider circles of diffusion, first to the proctors and flow people at the project, then to the committee representatives at the dormitory, then the neighborhood and city committees; eventually the whole Applications system would have to be informed—would in the course of things become informed even if they only made their intentions known to the first levels of this diffusion. And it was true that in some ways they, Hare and Eva, would stick out: the two of them would make a spike within the regularities of cadre life, which was almost entirely unmarried, assumed to be celibate out of dedication and the pressure of work, and communal in ways that made strong pacts between individuals unusual; which meant that strong pacts between individuals upset people who were upset by unusual things. But why, Hare asked Eva, shouldn’t the two of them be an oddity? Didn’t she know that such oddities, such spikes, were implicit in the forms of communal life if that life isn’t imposed by a hierarchy, is not tyrannical, is chosen, is the Revolution itself? They are assumed; they are already accounted for.

  She did know that. But when Hare said—carefully, mildly, without insistence, a plan only for her to consider—that they could make their plans known at the first levels, within the first circles, and see if they were prevented even in the most subtle ways, and at the first signs of such resistance (though he knew there could be no such resistance) draw back if she liked: then she looked away and bit her nails (they were small, and bitten so short that the flesh of her fingertips folded over them; it hurt Hare to look at them) and said nothing.

  She wanted something to defy, and there was nothing. She didn’t want to hear his explanations of heterarchy, and when he made them, he felt as though he were betraying her.

  He knew so much. He knew nothing.

  He remembered her face, the day when she told him she was pregnant: her eyes questioning him even as her mouth said she didn’t care what he did, this act was hers, she alone had decided on it. She expected some declaration from him, he knew: a denunciation of her for having done this, or a sudden pact offered that he would join her in it, as though joining a conspiracy. It didn’t even seem to matter which he did—join her or denounce her. In fact he did neither, not being able to imagine either, not knowing why she should set such terms for him, yet knowing also that it was not really he who was being challenged; and obscurely certain he was failing her by not being able to feel as she did—that her act was a crossroads, a crux, a turning point where a fatal choice had to be made.

  He thought: What if I had pretended to understand? If she thought she was surrounded by watching authorities, who wanted her not to do what she wanted, if the child had been a defiance of those authorities, then what if he had somehow pretended to join her in her defiance? Would she have believed him? Would she not have gone away? He thought it was possible, and it hollowed his chest to think so.

  The cadre crèche was a cluster of low buildings, dormitories, a barn, yards, infirmary, school; beyond were the gardens and fields that the commune worked. In and out the doors, through the halls bright with autumn sunlight, boys and girls came and went, and women tending groups of children. Hare thought this must be a good place for children; it was crowded with the things children like—tools, growing things, farm animals, other children.

  He wandered from room to room with his gift and books, asking for Eva. All the men and women who lived and worked in the crèche were parents of children being raised here, but many other children of cadre were here whose parents had chosen not to stay with them. Hare thought of them, the parents, separated also from each other perhaps, attached to faraway long-term projects, or working with the people in distant cities.

  It’s just hard for cadre, that’s all, he thought, very hard. The people acted as they acted, their actions describable by theory but otherwise unbound; for cadre it was different. There were no theoretical barriers to their acting just as they would; theoretically, they did exactly that. In practice it was different, or seemed to be different; there seemed to be a gap there, a gap that only kindness and a little good humor could cross. He and Eva were bound by that now, if by nothing else; bound by what separated them, by the whole front of the Revolution sweeping forward at once, which could not be otherwise. Wit
h kindness and humor they could cross the gap. It was enough; no one had anything better. It was hard but fair.

  In the summer refectory the long tables were now heaped with gourds and vegetables to be put by for the winter; men and women were stringing onions and peppers, hanging up bunches of corn to dry, packing potatoes for storage. Hare stood at the threshold of the broad, screened room filled with harvest, sensing Eva among them before he saw her.

  “Hello, Eva.”

  She turned to find him behind her, and a smile broke on her face that lifted his heart as on a wave. “Hello,” she said. “How did you get here?”

  “I found a ride. How are you?”

  She only regarded him, still smiling; her cheeks were blushed with summer sun, like fruit. “Where’s Boy?” Hare asked.

  She had called their son only “the boy” or “boy” from the start, refusing to give him any other name; eventually “Boy” had become simply his name, a name like any other.

  “He’s here,” Eva said. She leaned to look under the table at which she sat and called: “Boy! Come see.”

  He came out from beneath the table, dark curls first, and lifted his enormous eyes (they seemed enormous to Hare) first to his mother, and then to Hare. “Hello,” said Hare. “I’ve brought this for you.”

  He held out the sphere to Boy, without revealing its secret, and Boy took it from him cautiously; the length of his eyelashes, when his eyes were cast down to study the gift, seemed also extraordinary to Hare. He opened the sphere; inside it was the pyramidal tetrahedron.