by Exurb1a
And you will respect my home. You are a guest here, however important you all think you are.
The Indigo kept its eyes on the child, but changed its private voice to a gentle purr.
Argie, I’m confused at your suspicion of us. I’ve no intention of upsetting the delicate balance of your burrow. It glanced at Argie for a moment then. And I’d never dream of introducing your daughter to such radical concepts as freedom of thought or independence of action.
Just get it over with, Argie shot back.
Nonagon sipped its tea thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “Kaluza, do you know where I’m from?”
Kaluza sat up straight, the calculation object still in her hand. “Indigo.”
“That’s right, and do you know what we do up in Indigo?”
“Mmm…” the child pouted. “Everything.”
Nonagon laughed heartily. “Ah, not far off!” Argie rolled her eyes and looked out over the ocean. “Anything we want to, really. That’s why Indigo is the most liberated of the tiers.”
“That depends on your definition of liberation,” Argie muttered.
“You see, we don’t really do things so…physically up there. We prefer to take the easier route, communicate with each other’s selfsenses, share memories directly, occupy many points in space at once.”
“You eat music,” Kaluza said.
“Yes sometimes, but most of the time we work on problems in geometry and mathematics, some ancient, some new. Why, there are whole worlds devoted to finding new prime numbers and entire families working on turbulence dynamics.”
“Families…” Argie said.
“Organisations,” Nonagon corrected itself. “We all work together and anyone is free to pursue the direction of interest that they’re most passionate about. The little object in your hand, that’s a tiny piece of our Great Postulate.”
“Great Postulate,” Kaluza echoed.
“That’s right. One day we’re going to have covered every area of mathematics. There’ll be no dark corners left. The entire theoretical universe will be open for exploration and we'll invite the whole of Arcadia in with us.”
Even us stupid ape-fuckers? Argie shot privately with her selfsense.
Nonagon ignored this.
“I thought Lemuria was where the mathematical domains are being explored,” Kaluza said.
“You're quite right, yes, but Indigo is where we actually apply them. Lemuria is...” the creature met sly eyes with Argie, “something of a sapien place. Indigo is its own creation. We intend to touch infinity, to reveal nature's true face if you will. We're learning to speak in the grammar of everything. One day we'll know exactly why the world was set up like this, why reality presents in this fashion. Beyond silly philosophical posturing, there will be no great questions left, no mysteries worth our time. And then our time will be limitless. No boundaries, no restrictions.”
“Except all the Glass King's rules that you have to obey, you mean?” Argie murmured.
Nonagon smiled diplomatically.
“What will you do then?” Kaluza said slowly.
“What’s that?” Nonagon said.
“What will you do when your project’s over?”
“Oh, whatever we want.”
The sentence pinged about in Argie's mind. Whatever we want. Yes, and what do I want? she wondered. How can I be happy forever? How can Kaluza be happy forever, truly? Is that what this is all about? Darting from thing to thing, experience to experience, like a thirsty beggar getting a sip of water here and there and still always coming away never quite fully quenched. What an awful game. Did I have my daughter for this? – to merely feel whole? Was there ever any other motivation in the history of procreation? It isn't a selfless act at all. How can one sacrifice themselves for a thing which doesn't yet exist? It's selfish. It's fucking selfish, the whole game, and I'm no better than any other monster.
She could ask Arcadia to improve her mood if she wished. Her selfsense would suddenly be suffused with pure delight. This strange visitor would seem to her an opportunity to improve her daughter’s education. The beach would appear brighter somehow. The sun would shine hotter. And what the hell would be the point of anything then?
“Mama doesn’t like me fooling with hypershapes,” Kaluza said.
“You almost corrupted the burrow,” Argie shot back. “Remember?”
“Ah, children are wont to experiment,” Nonagon said in a half-wise voice. “Nevertheless, we’re always interested in talking to up-and-coming creative minds like yours, Kaluza. That’s exactly what Indigo is for.”
“Mama said we should stay down in the Ape Cellar.”
“I did not.”
“Ahh,” Nonagon smiled. “That’s quite understandable. Well, we wouldn’t want to steal you away. But if ever you feel like you might want to pay us a visit, just come up for a cycle or two. It’d be my pleasure to show you around. There’s no obligation at all to stay.”
“That’s quite enough,” Argie said.
“And there are plenty more children like you who-”
“That’s quite enough,” Argie said again and vanished the tea and table. She actuated a portal on the beach, just behind Nonagon. “Best if you leave now. You’ve said quite enough.”
A silence held out, save for Kaluza’s exotic birds screeching in the distance. The child looked to her mother. Nonagon kept its face quite still.
“Thanks for the visit,” Argie said.
Nonagon leaned across to Kaluza. “If ever you feel like paying us a visit, just bring that little toy with you. The gatekeepers will let you right in.”
Get out before I set the burrow security on you, Argie shot by selfsense.
Is that so? the Indigo said and turned out to the ocean and concentrated for a moment. Hypershapes appeared, tens, hundreds of them, swirling, gyrating, intersecting; their edges bleeding into each other, passing straight through the island. Kaluza giggled, delighted.
Get the fuck out, Argie barked privately. Now.
Nonagon did not use the portal, but merely vanished where it sat.
“We'll come back,” The Navigator shouted. “We'll come back, I swear it.”
To what end? Misinidai chuckled.
“We'll lead you back to a tier. You're fractured, aren't you? Must be, we can't find an identity-key. Whatever happened, we'll get you back to a tier, but you must trust us, you understand?”
I like you here better, came the reply in a dark and quiet voice.
The Navigator swore under his breath, held silent, watched the dark. Yells and distorted calls sounded from all about them, in True Space.
Argie summoned a memory, one she had not touched in some time; a pure sensation. It was that of holding her daughter, of feeling the child close and knowing her safe, of looking for the word 'future' and finding a temperate meadow in its place. She bundled the memory up, pushed it gently out of her as a selfsense packet, watched the thing absorb into Misinidai's great bulk.
“We need to get to Lemuria,” Argie said. “You understand?”
Silence. Then, slowly, with a grating black howl, the dome lifted.
9.
29/11/2021
P,
We got hammered in some artsy bar that looked like a library. A few glasses of wine and Dimitar let his hair down a little and Maria actually started smiling occasionally. They talked about their work, most of which was total gibberish to me. They talked about their families. And then they talked about you.
You didn’t get on well with other kids, Dimitar said. You picked fights and played games by yourself in the fields around your village. I only ever remember you picking fights with me, to be honest. God, actually, what an archive of fights we have. Is there anything that didn’t turn into some dumb screaming row? Me mentioning women at work in innocence or suggesting that maybe Marx was too utopian or the odd little joke about murdering your mother. Or putting sugar in green tea. And then that far off stare you do, like all of life is just s
ome annoying distraction getting in the way of your big numbery masterpiece.
I went to smoke on the bar balcony and Dimitar joined alongside and stayed silent for a while. Then he said, “She’ll be alive. She’s clever.”
“Most clever people are already dead,” I said.
“She’ll be alive.”
I understood why you liked him, suddenly. He had a soul, even if he was a mathematician.
Maria came out and we smoked a few joints and they offered me lines of something and I politely declined. They walked me back to my hotel. I stayed up until sunrise trawling through old photos of us online. In some of them you were even smiling.
Woke up deathly hungover in the morning and caught the flight in time and got home in the afternoon. Some small but loud part of me quite expected you to be sitting on the sofa; maybe working on your laptop like every other evening, staring like a hawk at whatever formula it is. And what formula, huh? Your big logical masterpiece they’re all so convinced you kept hammering away at: did you solve the universe, darling?
You weren’t at home. More than that, the door was already open and the lock had been bashed off. The computers were gone. So were my instruments. They’d had a go at the safe too, but no luck. Reported it to the police; they’re probably sick of hearing from me already. Probably think I did it myself just to break the monotony. I don’t mind so much. We lived minimally anyway, and besides, I still have my laptop.
They hadn’t even taken your jewellery. I idly picked through some of it: your engagement ring, the earrings your mother sent for Christmas. And then there was a little blue pin broach affair I didn’t recognise, some kind of jagged circle. That seemed odd. You never wore jewellery, even mild stuff; always said it was primitive. So what was all this about?
The police came over, a man and a woman; took a statement.
No valuables missing? they asked.
Nothing besides a few computers, I said.
The two of them narrowed their eyes suspiciously.
Money? Credit cards?
Left all of it, I said.
I was probably a celebrity at the police station by now, so I imagine they didn’t want to give me too much undue stress, but I could tell damn well what they were thinking: Stupid bastard did it himself for attention. Must be going out of his mind.
Made me think of that story about the writer, Philip K. Dick. He came home one night to find his special reinforced cabinet with all his manuscripts in had been broken into. After much investigation the police reluctantly informed Dick that the most likely culprit was Dick himself.
“What if I am?” he apparently said, and went off to think about that for the next few years.
Anyway, I tidied up and checked the rest of the house and did a good bit of drinking and slept on a mattress on the floor. I like it down there, it's quieter. In the morning I took the strange blue broach to the jewellers. The old man peered at it with one of those little telescope things and said it was a blue ruby. I said that was stupid, you’d never wear a ruby. He said, “That’s nice. It’s a blue ruby.” He peered a bit more at the thing. “And it’s a triacontagon, if you’re interested.”
“What?”
“Thirty sides. It’s called a triacontagon.”
“Is that common?”
“In what?” he said.
“In jewellery.”
“Not until recently.”
I politely waited for more and when it didn’t come I said, “Sorry?”
“I know a gemcutter. He’s been commissioned to make six of these already this year.”
“Just like this?” I said and eyed the little blue whatever-it-was.
“Just like this.”
“Can you give me his number?”
“What you be wanting with that?”
“I’m a private investigator,” I said, which was not a lie. The matter is private and I’m investigating it.
“Do they even exist anymore?”
“Yes.”
He shrugged and gave me the number. I drove over to the gemcutter’s place without phoning ahead. He was a tubby old gentleman, but more polite than the jeweller. He had made twelve broaches in all, each identical. In every case the order was placed over the phone by a man who paid in cash and turned up to collect them in a Citroën 2CV. It was imperative, the buyer had stated, that each ruby have no more or less than thirty sides of equal length. He left no number or contact information behind of any kind, if the gemcutter was telling the truth. So that was that.
I did a bit of research at home about triacontagons. There were some pretty graphics I didn’t understand. One image caught my eye: something called the E8 model, a rather complex shape composed of nodes and lines joining each node to every other point in the shape. It wasn’t the shape itself that was interesting though. You’d been banging on about E8-something a few years ago, some physicist working on whatever. His name was Garrett Lisi and according to one of his talks he suspected he may’ve found the beginnings of a – get this – 'Theory of Everything'. My heart skipped a beat. This was no coincidence. It had your fingerprints all over it.
I stayed up into the night again, reading over the basics. All known subatomic particles and their interactions could be modelled onto the E8 structure. It looked quite pretty. Lots of physicists were sceptical, however. There were plenty of correlations between geometry and nature that had turned out to be little more than fruitless curiosities. If it had predictive power, fine. If not, put it on the pile with the others and have another bonfire of dead ideas.
What kind of research group wears broaches though? A serious one, I should imagine.
I sent the E8 stuff and a picture of the broach over to Dimitar and Maria, asking if they knew anything about it.
Why were you always so obsessed with order? You never lived your life in an orderly fashion, just left your shit all over the house, paid bills at the last minute. What makes you think the universe is any more diligent in its approach? It had never really occurred to me before, but maybe all your communist leanings were some desperate grope for a time when governments had better control over the messy lives of human beings. Guaranteed job, guaranteed income, no acting beyond your purview, all thoughts tidied away in their neat corners. My god, the rows we had.
You brought up North Korea endlessly.
Oh great, I said. Those guys seem really happy.
No, you said. What about all the defectors who escaped and went to live in South Korea? They said they loved it, but missed the social way of life.
Executions and starvation. A golden age.
No, you said a bit louder. The technology, the food, the state of living, they loved those aspects of their new lives. But they felt sorry for their South Korean friends for having to work such long hours, for always trying to get ahead of their friends in their careers, for all the status anxiety.
I’d rather be well-fed and unfulfilled than starving and inspired.
If I recall correctly, lots of shouting started: How can you be so ideological, what’s so great about owning things, don’t you realise western democracies are all built on exploitation of cheap labour etc.
Well Polly, the world is harsh and humans still have both feet in their hunter-gatherer history, and shouting that we’re all equal doesn’t make it so. Joining some dumb research group and wearing special expensive jewellery isn’t going to bring about the order in the world you’re so desperately craving. Humans are chaotic. Nature is chaotic. There’s no bottom to any of it and you’re wasting your time even entertaining the idea that sense will pop out of the whole game at some point.
I don’t mean that.
I don’t stand anywhere politically, I sit. You know this.
I just miss you.
Christ's balls, I miss you.
B x
10.
Argie had a body again. Relief. Two arms, two legs, two eyes, one nose, genitals in the correct place. A cosmic scene hung before her, billions of stars, an unfa
miliar ribbon of light, probably a galaxy, stretching across the entire scene from end to end. The Navigator floated beside her, his body restored also, his belly missing as usual.
“We made it?” Argie said cautiously.
The Navigator nodded. “Wasn’t so bad, eh?”
“Where are we?”
The Navigator shrugged, as much as was possible in zero gravity anyway. “Lemuria. That much we know for sure.”
“I can’t see any tags or dimension signifiers on anything…”
“There aren’t any. Lemuria doesn’t use them all that much anymore. They consider it primitive.”
“Then how do we interact with anything?”
As if she’d been overheard by some passing deity, a female voice said: “Would you like to begin?”
“Begin what?” Argie replied.
They both turned about in space. No one was nearby, nor were there any planets or asteroids or anything of the like.
“Yes,” The Navigator said. “We would like to begin.”
Two spheres appeared in the distance, one red, one green. Above the spheres hung tags. “World I” and “World II”.
“I thought you said they don’t use tags?” Argie murmured.
“That’s right. The tier probably detected we came from the Ape Cellar and is being accommodating.”
“The Lemurians don’t strike me as the accommodating type.”
“Come on,” The Navigator said and grabbed her hand, leading them towards World I. They travelled far past lightspeed, the stars streaking and smearing ahead of them. The planet was red and dusty, covered in globular dome structures. A great X lay in the northern hemisphere of the planet. The two of them descended without discussion to the planet’s surface. A huge crowd of creatures had gathered around the X. The creatures themselves appeared to be made of a gelatinous substance of some kind, their organs clearly visible inside. They did not have eyes as such, but appeared to follow Argie and The Navigator as they traversed the great X towards one side of the crowd. One creature in particular emerged from the crowd – larger than the others, and dressed in a robe of some kind.