An Attempt to Expressionistically Infoliate the Subjective Process of Becoming Without Allowing For Such Chills

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An explanation. Like a crossword across and down, you may read this in the order it’s presented, or reading part -1- of each header, then part -2- of each header, and so on, all the way to -8-. It will make just as much sense either way. The more bizarre way is much cooler.

 

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Postscript to the Return

-1-

True life is absent; we are not in the world.

“If you have answers, enter not.

Enter only to learn.

Without disposition to decipher with effort, care, and awe, enter not.

These are not your world’s words.

They are made of burnt rose incense cinder, and are fragile.

Breathe softly as if in a bower on the verge of waking, or enter not, lest the rose crumbles.

This is a futile warning.”

Such advice went unheeded one time. There was great fortune (does it soothe you still?). But who cares for a story both in the past and in the future? At no time it was untold. At no time there could be informed hope of this advice ever being heeded. We’re all wind-up toys here.

 

 

Glass-Editing: An Apotheosis-some Phanopoeia

-1-

America, a backward youth in a playroom equipped with luxury and electric power, pretends that his mechanical toy moves the world. China, a gentleman walking in his garden in the evening, admires the fragrance and the order all the more because in the air is the first nip of winter, and in his ear rumour of the irresistible barbarian.

I was dreaming. Certainly I was dreaming.

The hotel had several cyberpunk nightclubs, but I was at a more traditional bar, sitting in the most comfortable couch in the world, and listening to a band covering the Mamas and Papas’ Got a Feeling. “…you’re stealing all the love I thought I was giving to you…”, she sang, and one of my four friends sat beside me.

I never met him. He does not exist. I dreamt him, and dreamed he was an old friend, and one of four.

He wore black, but in a way rebelled against it, wearing a t-shirt colored like white noise, TV static, over a long-sleeved black shirt. I liked his graphite-black pants, which did justice to his butt, but his tennis-boots hybrids were too bourgeois, too not-functional. His face was pale, his smile was sarcastic, and his hair covered his face and went all the way down to his chest. He wore blueish sunglasses indoors. He said:

“Free love for those who want free love, unfree love for those who want unfree love. All I know is that if I gave love to one who passed it on for free, I would feel robbed.”

“Stay away from the day’s, then,” I offered.

“Harder than it sounds. If there’s a moral to anything ever, is that it sucks to be alone. How’s business?”

“I’m late.”

“Get going, then. It’s the future of the world in your hands.”

We shared a formal laugh and stood up. We turned and faced the couch. I pulled one of many small flasks of fuel I carried in holsters inside my suit, poured its contents on the couch, and with a flick of the wrist lit a match. I gazed into the flame for a second, and then let it fall, and then the couch was ablaze.

A meaningless dream.

“Good job there.”

“Thanks.”

“Nice suit, too.”

“Thanks. See you.”

“Catch you later,” he said. He stayed watching the couch burn as I left.

I passed many Saudis, dressed painfully white, and wondered if this was Riyadh. They spoke very low, of Avicenna and Averroës, and of the Conference of the Birds. But they spoke not in sounds, but in speech bubbles, filled with delicate arabesques. I could not read, but I gleaned some meaning. It was, after all, a dream. Right?

But I also passed many Chinese businessmen, also very serious and hush-hush. They wore Western suits, but all had silk handkerchiefs of black or deep blue hanging from their pockets. They also spoke in speech bubbles, containing – you got it – Chinese ideograms. They spoke of Zhuangzi and Mencius, and of the Taming of the Harp.

The streets outside were filthy. All buildings but the hotel were damaged. The architecture was also a mixture of Arab and Chinese, but all in ruins, like in a war-torn city. I walked among the people. Many lacked limbs, or were blind. Blood ran down their shirts, as did urine down their legs. Children lay in their own filth. Some passed by riding bicycles, their intestines dragging behind them. Broken bones could be seen exposed, jutting out of quivering flesh, bodies broken into horrifying shapes. Skin fell in flakes, or gave way to parasites, cracking open in sickly fungal blooms. People coughed out maggots and broken teeth. Molten fat tissue oozed down gaping wounds. They went on whatever business they had. Some begged. A kid without a skull, his head just a big mass of deformed flesh, was selling newspapers. I bought one, but could not read its contents. There were pictures of surgical strikes, of crèches burned to the ground by freedom, charred children burying their ember-glowing stumps in the sand outside.

 

-2-

‘As soon as I started to cross the bridge, the thought occurred to me that it might be amusing to cross with my eyes shut. And I did so.’

I walked for some two, three hours in that nightmare (for nightmare it was), not minding it too much. I reached a plaza. A dry fountain in the middle. A ragged couch close to it. I sat there, beside friend #2 of four. It was a thin, young Inuit. She was eating a hotdog. She wore a boyish white sleeveless shirt and black jeans. Her shirt was painfully white and luminous, except where it had mustard on it.

“Hello.”

“Hi. War, crazy thing, don’t you think?”

I nodded absent-mindedly.

“Your business here is almost complete.”

“Yep.”

“In Homer’s writings, they talk like this about prophecy: nobody says ‘foresee’, ‘predict’, ‘prophesize’ or anything like that, but rather they use the sentence ‘tell the return’. Motion and time, perhaps circular, are all confused, merged.”

“It’s a view. It happens.”

She finished her hotdog. Then she took another she had left on the floor, beside the couch, and went at it with gusto.

“People are killing one another for prize cuts of meat.”

“Crazy.”

“Yeh.”

“For drug money?”

“That too, and upgrades.”

I nodded. Slowly. Silently. And stood up.

She stood up as well, slapped me in the back, and left. I set fire to the couch. And my job in the city was complete. I began my trip back to the hotel. Convoys of humvees passed by now and then, armed men in desert uniforms on it, faceless. One of the convoys had The President in it. I took no mind of him, or of them.

Hours later I realized I didn’t know the way to the hotel.

 

-3-

…ghost consequences, comparable to the ghost toes of an amputee or to the fanning out of additional squares which a chess knight (that skip-space piece), standing on a marginal file, “feels” in phantom extensions beyond the board, but which have no effect whatsoever on his real moves, on the real play.

I wandered many days, amidst the diseased and the excrement. But I never saw any despair. People went about their business. At some times I felt a huge oppression, I felt greatly tired, and these times I walked upside down, on my hands, which provided some relief, and marked me as different from the people around me. I entered people’s homes looking for a shortcut. One of these times, I found myself in a little ragged bar, and friend #3 of four was there – a fat monk, brown robes, deep-set blue eyes, hairy hands, no teeth, and a glass of some translucent spirit. He was coughing before he noticed me.

“Heya.”

“I’m a little lost.”

“Figures. Major Harding is that guy there in that table. Fat guy. Not covered in shit. Stands out in this city, doesn’t he?”

“I suppose he does.”

“I’m afraid he’ll be the only one able to provide you with directions.”

“Okay. Goodbye, ‘Pisty.”

He started upon hearing his name, but I was already walking towards the Major. That was this large colonial aristocrat guy, big white moustache and that hilarious pith helmet thing.

“God save the Queen,” I said.

He cringed, and put out his tongue, and bit it. Then he squeezed it with his fingers and dusted it off his sleeve, before pulling it back into his mouth. He shook his head vehemently. Then he spoke:

“You don’t say that kind of thing anymore.”

“Okay.”

“Lovely weather, eh?”

“It’s not bad.”

“How about some Earl Grey and fried liver ice-cream?”

“No, thanks. How do I go back to my hotel? It’s a Sheraton, I think. I dunno. Any luxury hotel will do, actually. They can provide me with taxis to the airport or something.”

“Ho! Ho! Ho! Hairs on a bobbin, son. Of course, this is the path you must take…”

He gave me detailed instructions, very complex and, ultimately I’d find, random.

“What a fine fellow,” I thought as I walked off.

The city was unchanged, and I went on. Through larger, but equally decrepit, buildings. Or perhaps the buildings were the same size as before, but this time I wasn’t sticking to the streets. Often I thought about what a lame fucking ride this dream was being. And I often walked on my hands, when I felt I was walking but not moving. I thought, “now I understand why I often do this in my dreams – it’s easier to perceive the ground, where you’re stepping, avoiding those type dreams where you just don’t seem to be getting anywhere”.

 

-4-

Then I stop to think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will, and since I have limitless power, I'm going to bring into being a tiger. Oh, incompetence! My dreams never know how to generate the savage beast I so desire. Yes, the tiger appears, but it is shrivelled or weakly, or with impure variations of form or an unacceptable size or is fleeting in appearance or takes the form of a dog or parrot.

It was during nighttime I met my last friend. She was a tall woman, a smile so big it appeared to be wider than her head, she was dressed like a gypsy.

“Hello, you. Nice job you did around here.”

“Hush, boy. If nothing else, you’ll scare off the little whore.”

“Who?”

“You’ll see her soon enough.”

“This is some Odyssey, or Kafkean labyrinth.”

“You’re just lost.”

“You don’t have all that many qualities, do you?”

“None,” she said, and her smile grew even larger. It was definitely wider than her head now. “That’s why I’m so lovely and all men court me.”

“Right. Right.”

There was a moment of silence, and then I snorted. Began laughing. Just then, like a bolting white rabbit, my Romantic Interest passed us and went into a building. I chased her.

She was a pink-haired young prostitute, scary, mysterious and underage. I loved her painfully, but can’t even recollect what exactly happened during the chase and afterwards. I remember at some time she explained to me

The 4 Laws of Oneiric Steersmanship

1. In dreams one must choose between having eyes or hands.

2. Every entity must be apprehended, in turn or synchronically, in gem-glistening reflection of every other entity.

3. The feigned profundity of the mirrored surfaces of clocks and puddles after it rained all night is just like honey.

4. If there’s nothing that will show beneath the clothes, anything goes.

And then at some point I was holding a dead girl. I don’t remember if it was my love. I just fled the crime scene. More wandering. Eventually I reached a hotel sheathed in scaffolding, not my hotel, but a hotel that wasn’t decayed like the rest of the city (which was larger than the inner surface of a sphere surrounding the whole galaxy – I just knew it, dream-like).

I had to enter, and so I climbed and went in an open window. I was in the room of this guy, right. And I was finally beginning to feel very desperate.

“Hey, I just got in your room by a window. Don’t worry. I just want to know if there is a way out.”

“Of course,” he said. He wore glasses, and his voice was low. “Call me the Riddlemaster Kaygiver[1]. With an ‘A’.”

“…ok.”

“You can leave the way you came in – by dying.”

I said nothing but it made sense (like things are wont to, within dreams, when they really don’t).

“This place has changed. Were you from New York? London?”

“I was in Beijing.”

“Aha. Changes.”

“So this is not a dream?”

“No, sorry, I’m afraid you died.”

“That sucks. Even if it’s true.”

He sighed. “Here, let me use my glass-editing powers to reveal you the truth about your condition.”

[1] Kayaker <-> kayiver perhaps.

 

-5-

These are the calamities by which Providence gradually disengages us from the love of life. Other evils fortitude may repel, or hope may mitigate, but irreparable privation leaves nothing to exercise resolution or flatter expectation. The dead cannot return, and nothing is left us here but languishment and grief.

And then the world above us became like clear glass. I could see I was being watched, and had been all the time, by some ‘scientists’. Or aliens. They were silent and expressionless. My four friends were with them, these ten or more scientists, watching me from above.

“He’s seen.”

“Get him.”

The world above collapsed into the hotel room, and my four friends grabbed me.

I was calm, at peace. The Kaygiver had disappeared. I spoke:

“Greetings, most polite greetings. I don’t know who you scientists are, or aliens, but I’m cool with you watching me. Can I help you in any way? Are you going to do bad things to me? That could erode trust between us. Let’s be reasonable.”

My friends laughed sadistically, and he in his TV-static t-shirt grabbed me from behind, and then hot-dog girl punched me in the guts. I feel on the floor vomiting, and the big lady pressed her heel against my face, holding me down. The fourth urinated on me.

‘Cruelty is the way of the world,’ I read their actions spelling.

They stepped back, laughing, and I stood up. “Well, I sure ‘heard’ what you had to say.”

Even the scientists opened thin smiles.

“I beg your utmost pardon, but: well, can I work for you? I believe in agreement, not conflict.”

Hot-dog was the first to stop laughing. “They already have enough people working for them.”

“Well, we’ll see about that.”

I watched myself from the outside as I drifted, the world frozen around me, until I was within arm’s reach of ‘Pisty, and I thrust my hand into his ribcage, and I pulled out a handful of ripped flesh. Blood sprayed the breadth of the room. He screamed in wrath, hands trying to get hold of something maybe elsewhere, and he fell in a loud crash.

Their leader said coolly, “Look at what you did. Now no-one will ail.” Hot-dog and gipsy were out of their minds with rage and fear, and charged at me. I broke the first’s neck with a clean circular kick, and held the other’s leg as she tried to kick me. I broke the leg. A shrill scream. I grabbed her head with both hands and squeezed. Foam and blood spat out of her mouth, her face contorted in pain and frustration. And then there was a sound that satisfied me in a way I’d forgotten possible.

I turned quickly. He was almost at my throat. He had almost got me. But I was the one who hit his neck with an open-handed thrust, and grabbed.

I said, “I read once… I can’t remember where… I can’t remember anything really, you know. But there are some that hold – and this is the heresy of the Saigoths – that when the gods go down at the last into their galleons of gold Mung shall turn alone, and, setting his back against Trehagobol and wielding the Sword of Severing which is called Death, shall fight out his last fight with the hound Time, his empty scabbard Sleep clattering loose beside him.”

The shock drained from his face. There was only emptiness.

“What am I? Am I Time?”

His lips said, soundlessly, “No.”

“Well. Goodbye.” I placed my left hand on his face, forefinger and thumb over his eyes, and just pushed in.

I laid him down carefully. I turned to the scientists.

“Do you know how I did this? How I’m so detached? I know I’m dreaming, I think. I may not control everything, but I don’t believe I can be harmed, and I don’t believe I have any limits. Not here.”

“Here in heaven,” one of them said.

“We are angels,” said another.

“The master of the house has died,” said another.

And in his absence, the angels had degenerated morally. I started believing them. It all seemed to make so much sense. And they maneuvered me, for they played an endless power game to undermine and eliminate one another in their rivalries for ultimate celestial power. I alone could kill an angel. How could I believe, at the same time, it was the ultimate reality of heaven (even if a broken heaven), while in another level I knew it was a dream, and drew power form that knowledge? That, in recollection, is the greatest contradiction to me.

 

-6-

The Truth about Sancho Panza. Without making any boast of it Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by feeding him a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from himself his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that this demon thereupon set out, uninhibited, on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a preordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza himself, harmed nobody. A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days.

Years, millennia, aeons later there were only three angels left. They feared me, and decided to destroy me, before it was too late. And this is the present. They are standing before me.

They show me – in their eyes of star-light in abyssal depths of velvet-black space – several stories, which I will narrate for you in due time – stories not to pass judgment on or even to witness, but to mediate.

I will tell you first, of my story, not the return, but the returns. For, before I speak of things that have nothing to do with me but for which, perhaps, you are there reading, my narrative branches here, into three different, incompatible ways. All are true.

 

-7a-

These are the voices of time, and they are all saying good-bye to you.

The three angels kill me and I ascend into Godhood.

I realize I am the incipient God reborn. Myself, my love so pink (such a bliss to feel her presence again), and the Riddlemaster compose one single person, which finally ends the celestial anarchy. We banish (watch the inclination of their heads!) the three elder angels and begin to make repairs, both in heaven and in reality.

And nothing will be allowed to remain unmended.

 

-7b-

Such a plan and such a dream are like an order that you’ve received from an unknown commander. The world around you is like an enemy army besieging a fortress.

I flee from the three angels. They chase me. And I hit the ground in frustration, in fierce anger at not having seen my romantic interest during all this time. And I breach open the ground. Heaven, that terrible place, begins to fall apart. It drains the angels’ essences to try to continue to exist. They go out like candles.

And my love is beside me. She knows she should be there. We hold hands, and jump into the breach. Heaven disintegrates above us, all souls in it crumbling, vanishing like clouds over time, in drought.

We fall together, her and I, in flames. One single thing falling in flames.

And we don’t hit the ground of Hell. No, it rises tenderly to meet our feet. There is peace all around us, and sincerity, and love. The place, we see, has become – has had to become, by necessity – most excellent and benign in God’s absence. We see in a colossal throne before us the ruler of this place, the one I had met under the (admittedly stupid) name of Kaygiver, but in this place called Luminous Lord. We smile, and walk hand in hand towards him, to have him officiate our marriage.

 

-7c-

What made Peter Ibbetson new, even in this genre, was its suggestion that ordinary people could control their dreams and through them move through time and space; that they could, at will, exchange an outer for an inner reality and live fully in the experience of the latter.

The ending that is more real than the others, that did happen, is that I wake up, and the illusions of heaven and of despair and of love remain merely as curiosities.

But what am I waking up to?

Who am I? I don’t remember anything but dreaming, like some drifting Boltzmann brain. I have this long blue mane and beard, this prisoner uniform, and I remember only one name: that this place is named Facility Negatur. My uniform also tells me I’m called Damaso, but the name is not familiar at all.

Did I even exist before waking up?

Did anything?

 

 

Devoid of Sound or Fury: A story told by one whose lips were covered in foam, blood and chant

          -1-

The Andromedans hear your voice like distant amusement park music

converged on by ambulance sirens

and they understand everything.

They're on your side. They forgive you.

Uzziel, angel of assassins, strode into the Lost Cathedral, wherein resides Trdrt, angel of loss of love, the feared cryptarch of the Platinum City of Risen Angels. “The Platinum City is unforgettable”, thought Uzziel, “even having lived for so long in a single universe my avatar can easily retrieve the memories and powers of my Timeless Ultimate Pandimensional Self. Yet the most remarkable is that every moment here maintains the same loftiness of stillness, of silence, and of clarity.”

For few were the Risen angels, and the streets were empty and void of movement; the dew-drops in the bamboo gardens between the alabaster and marble streets were dewdrops of eternity, and no breeze swept the nonexistent dust. Blossoms of ipê hung in mid-fall.

For silent were the Risen angels, and the streets had no laughter of children and no cries. The fountains’ murmurs drowned themselves. The feet of the angels made no sound as they strode, because they carried no sins. The birds did not sing, for they were not impure.

For bright were the Risen angels, made of divine light that they were; the Risen angels were those that no longer needed to stand close to God, to reflect His Ultimate Light Absolute, but themselves shone like desert suns, and the buildings reflected their shine to infinity, leaving no time, no shadows, and no triangles.

Trdrt stood in front of a mirror, basking in his own holiness. He spoke to Uzziel in divine light: “Brother Zzl, you visit me.”

“Brother and Cryptarch, I ask for your aid.”

“My fair Zzl, I am not a giver of gifts but a destroyer of them, yet I would enjoy helping you if within my meager means.”

“The Pinnacle-universe is threatened by Eçaraia, who wishes to make all as if nothing ever existed, us included.”

“That I know, even though I take little interest in Eçaraia, sterile and incapable of love as she is.”

“Yet one madman who calls himself Moebius seems to love her, for he’s aiding her. All Creations are threatened. We are too. Stop him, and save all.”

Trdrt laughed the light of all mornings. It made no sound, yet it was melodious, rich and pure.

“Think about me, and think about Eçaraia. What do you conclude? Do we oppose? Should we be enemies?”

Uzziel murmured, like a light through a keyhole: “Taste of Lethê, and forget all you have loved…”

“Indeed. She would have all forget their loves. I would have all lose their loves, but remember their loss.”

“So you do oppose.”

“We are different. Yet are we not part of the same pantheon?”

“What do you mean?”

“We are the two most feared entities. I have a gentlemanly respect of her. I admire her work. Although forgetfulness is often merciful, too merciful.”

“Watching your handiwork, sometimes I wonder whether all would not be better off not having existed.”

“And you are he of the assassins! You are he of the garrote, the savage edge of the hidden razor, poison, poison, everything is poison, nothing is poison, you are he of the clubbed babies in their cribs, of a sicarian standing before suddenly, hands red and blade red, you are protector of the snipers, you love them all like a wife loves a husband, you love the explosive in the cellular phone, the polonium-210, the surgical air-strike, the orbital laser, the remotely-controlled landmine, you are an angel of all that goes directly against one of the Ten Commandments these contemptible fools believe in.”

“I love the means, and those who use them with love.”

“I am not chastising you, but magnifying your glory so mine shines even brighter in comparison. For rightfully you chastise me. And this is what I will do: I will threaten you. Abandon your avatar, and leave that universe’s Order in Moebius’ hands.”

“You can’t possibly-!”

“I am being merciful for I very nearly love you! Have not your hallowed taken away the love of myriads? I could have you serve Moebius and be at his disposal, for such is my sympathy for his daring sadism against these Creations in whose eyes I spit. No, you remain free. Only if you refuse my simple request will I destroy your love, and the love of your servants. You shall know the utmost misery throughout the universes. Yet I know I need not worry, for you are a Risen angel, and, knowing my omnipotence in these matters, will not consider disobeisance.”

Uzziel was in despondency. “How can you do this? Morally, I mean – how?”

And Trdrt stopped smirking for what could be the first time in eternity.

“I shall tell you the truth, for you are one of the most elegant and perfect Risen Angels.

Am I not a messenger?

Yet the Risen Angels write their own messages.

But even they only write as is dictated From Above.

I am what I am because I’m Written So.

Have you not Faith?

Can you not distill Acceptance into amor fati?

Do you not love the Plan, whichever it is, whether in The End love wins, or I do?

Then trust that even I am just an instrument of whichever nature the Most Holy Sun Absolute ultimately possesses: that of Fate or that of Chance, or another more nameless.

I hope to be fearsome and sadistic, but it’s an empty and designed hope.

Look out the window at the Platinum City.

Only mortals, who haven’t been here, should worry about anything, care about anything, despair about anything.

We are here. Be with me a while, looking out this window.

Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.”

Uzziel smiled, and then laughed, and they laughed together, laughed light so perfect as that which falls, From Above, on our laughing loves.

 

 

Circumtext of Mohism and the World of Threemorrow: An Efflorescence of Transitoriness

     -1-

…a compromise between the conflicting claims of love and wisdom… particular attention to the ming ch’i or “spirit articles,” the vessels and other objects interred with the dead, specifying that they should be those used by living men (the claim of love), but at the same time somehow different and useless (the claim of wisdom)…

It was reported Master Provost-Condottiere of Airborne Spelunkers Adolphus Hellerstein died of jungle poison (Type D) in Vavooiepes K, a planet attacked by the Unwritten Ones in a clever, massive feint that was barely recognized in time and contained by the Gamezohan forces.

His friends of the High Preemptive Warthogs, having nothing better to do as the universe ends, became jungle warlords of the primitive Ccachuerp butterfly men, and conducted ceremonies and funeral games for his friend.

“Here?”

“Hmm. No, over there.”

Doom carried the camera to the second level of the Dolph Pagoda, one of the monuments erected with the Ccachuerps’ slave labor.

“Yeah, it’s a good angle. You can get in a triangle the Dolph Ziggurat, the Dolph Minaret and the Dolph Acropolis.”

“Alright. Camera four already covers the landscape between the Dolph Gazebo and the Dolph Levitating Sphere (that most excellent feature of Gazraki architecture), as well as having a fine view of the Pagoda itself.”

Doom jumped down, his boot jets responding automatically. “How are preparations of the body for the pyre?”

“The Ccackies have no ceremonial burial rites, so Mitya is using the XAV-4 to corner a pack of mixed morphers sighted in the plains to the southeast. Mostly cats and lizards, with some wolves. The theurge is reportedly named One Bereft Bunny.”

“Yeah, um, aren’t shifters under the jurisdiction of King Omnibus?”

“Yeah, well, fuck him if he can’t spare a few. This is the funeral of a Warthog.”

“Indeed.” Doom looked towards the sky. The three suns reflected off his metallic mask. “I think we should put him in his ‘I want to be irrationally exuberant again’ t-shirt.”

“A promise of triumph over death as good as any,” agreed Corso.

“And the games?”

“I thought of chariot racing, for Homeric flavor, but the way these fellows are, it would be as entertaining as a great, epic chess match in the Planet of the Retards.”

They meditated on this.

“Actually, a chess match in the Planet of the Retards would be quite cool.”

“…yeah. A lot of effort to make a single move by the rules, and if it’s vaguely conducive to victory the player would think himself so Sun-Tzu. It’s what out world is like, though, isn’t it? You don’t see many superintellects speedrunning through life.”

“Hah, if you want to get all existential. We can’t all be Chancellor Moebius.”

They were silent.

“Well, fuck,” said Corso, finally.

“He’s dead. It happens.”

“I suppose.”

“Remember what he used to say. The situation is hopeless but not serious.”

“True.”

A Ccachuerp flew in fractal spirals towards them, bumping into the landscape repeatedly as it came. “Your friend has sent a message. He says the animal-people were compliant and he’s got the shaman under custody.”

“Alright, Ccacky, have all available men making those chariots I explained earlier.”

“Yes, master deified entity, sir.”

“And quick, or else Doom here will throw another fireball at the communal housing. Won’t you, Doom?”

“Yeah, possibly. I don’t know.”

“See, he doesn’t know. It means he might. Oh, the guy has scrambled away already.”

“Yes, yes he has. They’re pyrophobic.”

“Really? Convenient.”

“The heat dehydrates their wings. Say, do you remember your earliest dream?”

“Well, I have this memory of a place I dreamed about once. All I remember was that it was an indoors without outdoors, a place not meant to exist but just somewhere for avatars to form and meet. The rooms were empty, and there were reflecting pools, and doors not meant to be opened in this age.”

“Very solemn.”

“Why you ask?”

“I dreamt of setting a whole world on fire. Billions agonized.”

“Ah.”

“It’s typical for my people.”

“I know.”

They were silent.

“No, Doom, you cannot make this whole world one epic funeral pyre for Dolph.”

“Aww.”

 

     -2-

In Greek tragic art and Hebrew worship of divine law, as also in the Indian resignation, man experienced, at first very obscurely, that vision of an alien and supernal beauty, which was to exalt and perplex him again and again throughout his whole career. The conflict between this worship and the intransigent loyalty to Life, embattled against Death, proved insoluble.

They were in front of the burial mound.

“What the fuck is that mural supposed to represent?”

“Men riding dragons throwing wolves at maggots. No, I’ve no idea either.”

“So, do we eulogize him or something?”

“I heard... that... motherfucker had like, thirty god damn dicks.” Doom elbowed Mitya. “Ow! Sorry.”

“Bob has something prepared, I think.”

“What, Bob? Are you going to do that gay ‘Let airplanes circle moaning overhead’ thing?”

“Hmph. No, I just find Catullus very appropriate for this. Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias, ut te postremo donarem munere mortis et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem. Quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum. Heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi, nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias, accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu, atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.”

They stood silent for a while, in the rain.

“Man, I wish I knew Latin,” said Mitya.

Corso and Doom chuckled. Corso then said, “Me too, memorizing phonetically is hard.”

“Now that’s ruining the moment, verily.”

They watched the puddles. They could almost ignore the mosquitoes.

Mitya looked away, and said: “Go out into the starry night, and Limpang-Tung will dance with thee who danced since the gods were young, the god of mirth and of melodious minstrels. Or offer up a jest to Limpang-Tung; only pray not in thy sorrow to Limpang-Tung, for he saith of sorrow: 'It may be very clever of the gods,' but he doth not understand. I thought of us Warthogs.”

Corso remembered some lines his boss had drawn his attention to, a fair while back – The rhetoric of immortality is also a psychology of survival and a cosmology… so that not the hero being celebrated but the celebration itself was hailed as immortal. He felt a deep pain and a great insufficiency.

“Dolph was, perhaps, the least spiritual of us,” said Doom. “He once mentioned he believed only in ‘that system of forces and probabilities that surrounds every human creature and is usually called destiny’. He also said it made all the difference in the world whether you believe in luck, in risk, or in destiny.”

“I’m mostly a risk person,” said Mitya. “I think we can manage it.”

“I’m partial to luck myself, being irresponsible and all,” said Corso.

“I heard that being ‘delivered’ to the winds of fate and chance is a sin explicitly denounced in a bull of Pope John XX.”

“I’m prone to agreeing,” replied Corso.

“While he told me,” said Mitya, “that he only had faith in two statements: ‘After all, the universe isn’t everything’ and ‘our destiny is planned by a supreme being named “total randomness”.’ At which point I had to hit him.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t have, in hindsight,” offered Doom.

Mitya shook his head. “No. I really had to.”

“Yes… you’re evidently correct.”

“He once told me,” said Corso, “what he believed the afterlife was like. ‘You get to battle Salvador Dalí in a duel with instruments like Theremins but they're used to play real life Plasma Pong. Instead of plasma the colorful fluid is Loss. The prize is marzipan, white chocolate and pistachio mousse. Lesbians cheer you on’.”

They meditated on this.

“I wish I was dead,” said Mitya.

“You have a good life,” said Doom.

“But it’s Salvador Dalí.”

“Good point.”

“We should make the ccackies play plasma pong in the funeral games.”

“Remember what I said about pyrophobia?”

“Exactly.”

“Ah.”

Doom broke the silence this time:

“But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity…”

“Then what?” asked Mitya.

“I forget. I’m more of a coffee man myself.”

Pause.

“Like Shepard tones are illusory our perceptions of mirth and grief…”

“Complete that thought.”

“I can’t.”

Silence.

“I feel like beating the crap out of the Mother Goddess, who also rules the underworld.”

“Tell me about it, that fucking cunt. What did Gilgamesh say in the poem? You set him to dwell in the middle of the garden,/ Where he can move neither upward nor downward.”

“I once saw a book at Sappho entitled To the dust: From man you came and to man you shall return. It was spreading mould to a Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.”

They chuckled, but that was soon muffled by the heat and wetness.

“I once watched this music video, right, about this yuppie with this briefcase, he starts vanishing while sitting at a table with some friends. I obsessed over it during a law-induced nervous breakdown, because I couldn’t remember anything about the song or the band. If I could find the vanished man, I reasoned in my despair, that’d mean there is no true oblivion. It was dream-logic while awake. Frightening.”

“Did you find it?”

“Nope. Gone like this. Even using advanced search heuristics and memory-retrieval drugs.”

“I guess there is oblivion.”

“Fuck.”

They watched the puddles.

-3-

There is no idea that does not carry in itself its possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.

After a long day of funeral games (dozens had died in the t-rex jousting, drift racing, freefall wrestling and napalm-walking competitions alone) a banquet was being held, to last from dusk till dawn. Fusion flamethrowers were being used as bonfires, over which whole triceratopses were being roasted, dripping the honey and watermelon sauce in the fire, filling the air with a sweet aroma. Ccachuerp cooks sprinkled cardamom and clover with braziers at the tip of long pine poles. Mitya had arranged local musicians in a band he named The Bowery Bums, and they were now making a fine, happy tribal sound (although they specialized in Creedence Clearwater Revival covers).

Corso walked among the revelers, moderately high on hallucinogen fumes of mushrooms tossed into the fires, with a mug of cappuccino. He moved weirdly as he walked, facing surfaces and objects from strange angles as if everything were brilliant-cut diamonds, leaning here and there very slowly, waving his arms in machine-like dancing, where the main point was not spilling the cappuccino. It appeared very important to him that this be so. The half-dancing was immensely comforting, possibly because the fumes induced religious feelings and thus he wondered whether Zeno’s arrow paradox applies to bullets fired from a Glock.

He was in front of the burial mound. He felt very happy and thus he sang: “And I’m a genius, genius. And I believe in God, and I believe that God believes in… oh, anyway.” He poked the burial mound. There was a muddy hole in it.

“Probably collapsed in the rain,” said Corso to the person standing nearby. “Stupid Ccackies can’t even build a pile of rocks.”

“You know, my Rabbi uncle once taught me Avicenna claimed all intellects were emanations from the Godhead. Consequential intellects arose from God’s self-reflection, among which the two celestial hierarchies, the Superior Hierarchy of Cherubim and the Inferior Hierarchy, of those he named ‘Angels of Magnificence’. These angels, I recall him saying, animate the heavens, and are deprived of all sensory perception, but have imagination which allows them to desire the intellect from which they came. Their vain quest to join this intellect causes an eternal movement in heaven. They also cause prophetic visions in humans.”

“Ah, so that’s how the stars work. That’s nice to know.”

“Yeah, well, asteryads are hot, so they’re my preferred theory.”

“Shame you died, still.”

Dolph sighed and recited:

“Oh, who can divide dream from reality, day from night, night from dawn, memory from illusion?

Who can draw a sharp line between sleep and death?

Who, O Lord, can draw a sharp dividing line between present, past and future?”

Corso raised a finger. “You know… I think I’m losing my mind.”

“No, you retard, I just didn’t die.”

“But the poison… Type D…”

“Humans from Earth don’t have squeedily spooches, and we have two kidneys and a most satisficing spleen.”

“Oh. Oh, that’d explain it. A death-like coma, then?”

“With significantly decelerated metabolism, yes. Thank you for putting a ton of rocks over my sarcophagus, asshole.”

“Sorry. We sort of imagined that you wouldn’t mind, being dead and all.”

“At least you buried me with my lightsaber. It was useful, to get out.”

“We thought you might need it in the afterlife. It seems we were right.”

“Fuck, I wonder if I can now find some hot goth babes interested in necrophilia.”

“You’re not really dead so it doesn’t count. I think.”

“Technicalities, like ever.”

“Was it easy, digging your way out?”

“No, but whenever I despaired, my need for porn restored my strengths and drove me on.”

“Makes sense.”

“Does this make you worry less about the appearance of things?”

“The more I think about it, the less I care. Corso family motto.”

They swatted mosquitoes and looked at a corner of starry sky.

“Angels in the stars give you dreams. Who’d figure.”

“It’s a made-up thing, you know. A religion thing.”

“Ah, alright. Go do your Easter thing to the other Warthogs and then let’s leave this fucking planet. Let’s leave this fucking planet and go back to the army before they send someone here to make us go ‘the horror, the horror’.”

“Yeah, alright. I wonder if I can make Doom think I’m a ghost, though…” Dolph trailed off.

Corso threw a mean look at the earth beneath his feet. “Fucking planet.”

He felt incredibly happy.

 

 

The Monkey King, the Five Pillars and the Buddha: A revelation (I am the beast of Mung mix)

-1-

To see taking shape a world in the image and likeness of the spaces of intellect, inhabited by a zodiac of signs corresponding to a rigorous geometry.

Davi Ardan entered the ÜIP room silently, silver platter in hand. It contained five white pellets, like pearls. They were condensed Delight, extracted from slaves by means arcane. He was very proud of his method, and very glad to be of service to his superior illuminated ones, even though he was unsure how the hierarchy went anymore. The pellets were all that these guests would consume, and all they’d need consume. He left the platter on a marble pedestal for the robots to serve, glanced at his superior watching him coldly, shivered, and exited, not wishing to be thought, to any extent, a bother. It disturbed him most that the five seats formed a circle, but the entities sat with their backs to one another, and Davi wasn’t even sure four of them were there physically.

“It might be said that we are, you’ll understand, somewhat concerned,” one spoke, finally – a melodious male voice, which was impossible not to love. Seeing that there would be no answer, he continued. “We know you are non-orientable, a surface with only one side and one boundary component. We aren’t used to uncertainty, but your mystery games are ever so intricate.”

A Moebius, a very important Moebius, tall and lean, powerful and almost sane, spoke. “Would you like to be let in my secrets? You flatter me, o Four Bastards.”

“We aren’t making a request,” said another male voice, younger and sadder than the first, pure abandon. To hear it was to desist. It was the sound of one hand letting go. “We aren’t even warning. We are reminding you that fates worse than destruction necessarily follow any hubristic challenge to our wills.”

“Why, o sweet deities, you know I’m too intelligent to dare interfere with your ceaseless dealing of heart-waste-land-ness. Am I one to say eventually, ‘I limned this night-piece, and it was my best’? My projects are trivial and limited in metaphysical intricacies, if not in scope. Or the other way around, limited in scope if not in metaphysical intricacy, I’m not fully sure myself.”

“I recall you nominally do this in my service,” said a hollow female voice, the most menacing of all, causing utter, utter dread. It sounded as if it knew better than acknowledging the one spoken to as more than infinitely transitory. “Should I be skeptical, slave?”

“Darlingmost, I’m hurt. I say I’ll give you everything everywhen, in all possible and impossible multiverses, to devour, yea, to devour and consume, and you repay me with such mistrust.”

“You play with us, Moebius, in the spirals and circles after your fashion, and that has a cost none can afford.” The male voice speaking was unpleasantly arrogant, and yet any listener would be scorched by the power, the certainty and the coolness it left no room to doubt. “You find yourself very clever, perhaps even enough to believe the Sol Absolute has taken interest in your actions, that the Sol Absolute is puzzled. But I alone of all entities am entitled to such arrogance. You may find, in the end, that the Inviolate Order will rise its hand, and your signature will be in its middle finger.”

The Moebius swallowed dry, calculatingly. “The OverMoebius assures me our plans do not mean to defy either you, or the Absolute, or even the cheesier entities like the Valendil-Archetype or Zarrothustra or the Gloomy One. And brother Anaxerretibes, of course, nothing defies him, and his inaction is endless.”

The first voice spoke, “Even though we are outside and beyond time, we can tire of pointless charades, like the ugly nightmares segments of vacuum have. You act hidden from time, and even the future does not contain what you’ll do because the story is being told with a glorious wealth of gaps and ambivalence. We order you to do whatever it is you’re going to do without delays. If you’re going to consume everything forever, including us, in oblivion, whatever, fine, not our problem really, just do it already.”

The second voice spoke, “Since that’s not likely somehow – you simply don’t sound the type who really wants just to erase all things, for the simple reason you’d like to be there to gloat, and there wouldn’t be any there to be – then run on, old man, rush headlong towards your doom. We can’t wait to see you fall. It’s bound to be epic.”

The third voice spoke, “And when you’re through with your toddling about the atrium of the holiest place, don’t crawl to me begging for mercy, my once favored one. The memory of your defeat is one that I won’t mind sparing, at least until the day comes of my ultimate triumph. Everyone must remember your defeat.”

The fourth voice spoke, “And that’s how all things must be – I alone am forever frozen in a zenith, and only because it is thus decreed, that others may envy me and aspire – and in aspiring, err. They may dream of suspended joys, without end, outside gravity’s rainbow, but my companions here ensure they do end. And we watch them fall, from a great height. How they tumble, the brightest ones!” He sighed. “Corna caldast. You, too, will be part of that endless rainbow of Fail.”

The Moebius lowered his head for a moment, and then suddenly drew himself erect, flashing crooked teeth. “You four personify yourselves as quite the insufferable cunts, don’t you? Fuck you. That Delight you consumed – don’t you think it could be, oh, poisoned? But – you’ll think – no harm could possibly come to us. But you’ll have a nagging doubt, because I’m so clever, because I’m clever like the fool in his Temple of Sol place. Suppose I imprisoned you, it’s well within my means. How humiliating! The ALL! The God of Evils From Excessive Dreaming and Lady Oblivion! Even the Paragon-Mirage, so endowed with cosmic prerogatives as he likes to point out! You four then become my tools, with which to destroy everything – I could destroy Love and Intellect and Time (that epiphenomenon of Memory) and Objective Reality, respectively. Would anything remain?”

“Perhaps mad laughter and that heaviness in the chest,” said the second voice, quietly.

“Potentiality,” said the fourth voice.

“And your brother’s sphere, wisdom, whatever that might be,” said the first voice.

Moebius waved his hand, dismissively, even though they weren’t facing him. “Bah, I got those four in my pocket. I can beat them any time I feel like it. No, fuckers, you think you are high and mighty because you’re in charge of the jobs your God-thing found too unappealing for his more righteous servants, but you are still servants.”

“Ah, is that it? You want to be the designated rebel? That’s also a job description, you know,” said the third voice. “The Inviolate Order’s oppositionists are also its tools – in exemplifying futility.”

“A question of faith, perhaps, but certainly a digression. Back to the subject at hand – what do you say of being my slaves now?”

There was a long silence.

“Good joke,” said the fourth voice.

“So ridiculous it’s not even insulting,” said the third voice.

“Your madness is truly a picturesque treat of the multiverse,” the second voice said.

“I did notice that suicidal streak in your nature before,” said the first voice.

Moebius laughed. “Well, I had to test my bluffing technique. You’ll have to wonder whether I could or could not do what I told you. Meanwhile, I’ll humbly follow your command and see my plans taken to fruition.” He stood up.

“Not so fast,” they chorused.

Moebius froze.

“We have gifts for the OverMoebius.”

Moebius closed his eyes and whimpered softly.

“Your self-love – that is pretty immense, isn’t it? Well, it isn’t anything, anymore.”

“I could leave you a gibbering moron, but that’d be no fun. I’ll just take away a piece of your puzzle, and you won’t know which until it’s complete. Was it a crucial piece, that will condemn your plan to failure, or was it unimportant? You’ll have that doubt stuck in your heart like a shard from a bursting mirror. Don’t worry though: it’s fifty-fifty. I’m a gamesman.”

“My regards to your daughter and your other favorite memories. Say goodbye to them. They’re dewdrops upon which I’m unleashing the desert air and the midday sun.”

Moebius clenched his fists and addressed the fourth voice. “And you, ya fucker? What will you take from me?”

Moebius felt a smirk, an overwhelmingly proud and vain smirk, like a mood falling upon his soul and smothering it. The reply came:

“The harm I could do to you I already have done, long ago, when my image incited you and you set out to win, not knowing what victory looks like from the vantage point of the Absolute.”

And they left, as if they had never been there.

-2-

Although it is certain that a person's life does not explain his work, it is equally certain that the two are connected. The truth is that that work to be done called for that life. From the very start, Cézanne's life found its only equilibrium by leaning on the work that was still in the future. His life was the preliminary project of his future work. The work to come is hinted at, but it would be wrong to take these hints for causes, although they do make a single adventure of his life and work. Here we are beyond causes and effects; both come together in the simultaneity of an eternal Cézanne who is at the same time the formula of what he wanted to be and what he wanted to do.

Before leaving, Moebius said to Davi, out of nowhere, to his utter bewilderment, a paraphrase of Chesterton: “Young man, I am amused to observe that you think I am a coward. As to that I shall say only one word, and it will be entirely in the manner of your own philosophical rhetoric. You think it is possible to pull down the Author. I know it is impossible, and I am going to try it.”

Moebius opened a portal and left to the room with the OverMoebius. He knelt in front of one of the OM-1’s throne, in front of one of the OM-minus-ones.

“It is done.”

The OM-1 are grievously obese and have huge heads. This OM-1 took the Moebius in its worm-like arms and cradled him. The Moebius started to whimper baby-like. With a thought, the OM-1 made Tootoo appear in the air. The Moebius took it in his arms and held on to it, sobbing.

The OM-1 thought in cacophonous unity.

WE ADVANCE WE ADVANCE IN OUR PLANS WE ADVANCE IN OUR PLANS AS EXPECTED WE ADVANCE IN OUR PLANS AS EXPECTED AS EXPECTED, they thought, AND THIS AND THIS PRICE WE’VE PAID, AND THIS PRICE WE’VE PAID, SO ENORMOUS, AND THIS PRICE WE’VE PAID, SO ENORMOUS, WAS ALSO AND THIS PRICE WE’VE PAID, SO ENORMOUS, WAS ALSO EXPECTED ALSO EXPECTED EXPECTED.

The Moebius opened his eyes, expectantly.

THIS SACRIFICE THIS SACRIFICE WAS US GETTING RID THIS SACRIFICE WAS US GETTING RID OF WHAT HAD TO BE SHED THIS SACRIFICE WAS US GETTING RID OF WHAT HAD TO BE SHED BEFORE WE CAN CROSS THIS SACRIFICE WAS US GETTING RID OF WHAT HAD TO BE SHED BEFORE WE CAN CROSS THE FINAL GATELESS THIS SACRIFICE WAS US GETTING RID OF WHAT HAD TO BE SHED BEFORE WE CAN CROSS THE FINAL GATELESS THE FINAL GATELESS GATEWAY, it reverberated across the minds that were. EVEN EVEN THE RETRIBUTION EVEN THE RETRIBUTION OF THE NEMESES EVEN THE RETRIBUTION OF THE NEMESES IS A TOOL EVEN THE RETRIBUTION OF THE NEMESES IS A TOOL FOR OUR EVEN THE RETRIBUTION OF THE NEMESES IS A TOOL FOR OUR WHIMS FOR OUR WHIMS OUR WHIMS.

“What will happen now?” asked the Moebius, shaking.

The seven OM-1 smiled. It was not a pleasant smile, because there was no self-love in it, only a machine completeness.

FRUITION FRUITION FRUITION FRUITION FRUITION FRUITION FRUITION.

 

 

Scorch the Sun: An Allegory

-1-

Roberto learned to see the universal world as a fragile tissue of enigmas, beyond which there was no longer an Author; or if there was, He seemed lost in the making of Himself from too many perspectives. If there Roberto had sensed a world now without any center, made up only of peripheries, here he felt himself truly in the most extreme and most of peripheries; because, if there was a center, it lay before him, and he was its most immobile satellite.

Shadowless Lieutenant Mokaddasa Tchitcherine commanded the Flying Bootstraps, a crack mercenary commando squad of mounted raiders. They were adept at attacking by night, when enemy morale and the desert have both cooled, and the shadows armor against fire. They entered battle with a pair of loaded pistols and a pair of loaded carbines, but never spent time reloading them, switching to their millenary composite bows and sending arrows into the foes’ guts after the first three bullets. They also charged with their straight, double edged swords in thrusting attacks, which they considered superior to slicing attacks. On horse they were formidable shots, and dismounted even better as snipers, or moving with Eastern stealth to remove a sentry with a dagger-jab to the kidney from behind. They were stealthy and so were their best mounts, but they rode their more expendable horses into battle. In hand-to-hand combat, they punched their thumbs into the enemy’s brain through the eyeball, showing no revulsion. In fact they were all adept killers, always shooting to hit and to kill, which they did without remorse or hesitation. But these honorable psychopaths from the steppes never did harm to those who surrendered in a timely fashion, in groups. Soldiers particularly fear enemies famed for a propensity towards melee weapon use, possibly because all sane men have nightmares in which rusted metal is buried in their garden by children with sliced cheeks, and furthermore the Flying Bootstraps were uniquely passionate about ending the tryst of soul and body. Thanks to their reputation for mercy, they were tactically invaluable, as entire regiments preferred to surrender than to fight – they did so also because they knew the Flying Bootstraps, like the rest of their people, would always fight to the last man.

For example, at one time the Flying Bootstraps were in the service of Ban Krisztián Árpád, Knight of the Dragon, known as The Flayer of Moonless Fae-Town. Once, Árpád had taken the cross and gone to the land beyond the mists, to convert the heathen fair folk to the cross and the messiah snuffed at the cross. He took a dozen select knights and completed a hundred men with mounted and dismounted sergeants. By the time he reached the fairies’ city, he was alone, his men destroyed with crescent-tipped arrows, lunatic madness or starlight itself. Some say the fairies had spared him because he was such a handsome man, blonde and boyish, some blue-eyed misplaced, furious angel, no beard, only stubble, and hands that did not become callused despite long practice at arms. They point out his armor, which was red and impregnable, did not include a helmet, for he liked to use his keen senses in combat; against the elves, that would be a fatal mistake, as any elven bowman could easily put a shaft through his skull faster than eyesight. This does not explain how, then, he managed to slaughter the town with his flammard-bladed broadsword. The truth was that he had prayed longly on the miracle of the host and the transubstantiation. God rewarded his righteous blood-shedding with an understanding of the mysteries of flesh and blood to rival any cannibal demigod’s. Árpád, in battle, changed his opponents’ bodies, or part of their bodies, into wheat-bread, or made them explode in poisonous mould. He could jump into a puddle of blood and emerge, in an explosion of innards, from the blood of a living opponent far away. He could change an infidel’s blood into holy water or wine, or make their flesh bloat until it was large as a dining hall and covered in loudly gargling chancres, completely foul to all senses; and his own injuries healed instantly. Surely these abilities explain how he single-handedly destroyed a citadel of the fair folk? And it was a moonless night, and so these fairies had little magic on their side. Almost all were strangled by their own intestines or torn apart by their own lymphatic nodes. He spared only the Queen of the Citadel, which he dishonored in the name of the Lord. He took her as a trophy to the Apostolic Palace. A few miles from the city, he took her down from her horse, tied her wrists and the rope he then tied to his mighty black destrier, and then he dragged her past the applauding populace.

The Pope excommunicated him on sight.

But that did not stop the knight’s self-avowed crusade, and he left his country and began a long campaign of banditry and insurgency within infidel lands, undermining the enemies of his faith, even though that faith had reviled him and his methods. He continued the theological studies of his teenage days, meditating on how important Judas was in God’s Plan. He embraced the sacrifice of his immortal soul as commanded by his deity, and toppled order and happiness wherever they were to be found in Christ-less nations. God rewarded him prodigally, with the gift of tongues and of tongues of fire, with the raising of the recently dead and the entombing of the newly alive, and power over the beasts of land and air. The only gift kept from him was that of flight. Some whispered he was too dangerous to be allowed to come close to heaven.

Such a man was the kind of employer the Flying Bootstraps rejoiced in.

Under Árpád, they were in the only Christian force to ever defeat an army of the Golden Horde. They drove the last druids out of the Northernmost woods, burning all sacred oaks and splitting with snow and fire their menhirs before casting them into the sea. Driving south, they defeated Mamluks at the height of their warrior prowess, and then submitted proud tribes of the desert, and the desert could not protect its children for perhaps the first time. They went east, past rugged mountainscapes of unpeaceable Bactria that trembled in fear in their wake and into monsoon jungles, where they exterminated the clerical castes of religions far more complex than theirs and pillaged great centers of learning. They tried going north but were closely defeated by a Tiger-and-Dragon Commander of the forces of the Middle Emperor. They returned south and embarked for the archipelagos, but Mokaddasa Tchitcherine had had enough by then, not having found what he had been looking for. The Bootstraps left without him, and they say that, traveling in their Chinese ships, they and Árpád finally met their end under the Plumed Serpent’s razor obsidian, at the base of the Gold Pyramid of Deathly Awe, and the whole Golden City was consumed in the avenging fires of jealous God – half a world away.

(They say he dragged the carcass of the Elf Queen behind the horse until his death.)

Tchitcherine went his way, sought guidance.

-2-

The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed,

They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as they lie unclothed.

“I’ve been flying.” The tent was dark, only a pair of braziers provided a dim red glow. A single beam of summer moon light pierced the silk, visible in the opium smoke. One elder used a curved golden dagger to cut slices of a black tea brick. He placed the slices in a large black wood bowl. Two others were reclined on silk and eiderdown cushions, silent in opium. Another dipped a bamboo and buffalo hair brush in ink and then made short, gentle strokes on a large, yellowed piece of parchment. Three sat, legs crossed, in front of Tchitcherine, watching him as he talked and drank eagerly (but reverently) from a bowl of iced water he had been given. One of these three absent-mindedly tuned a qobyz, another stroked his beard with crescent-shaped movements, and the only woman among the seven sat where the moonbeam fell on her face, her only adornment.

“I have not found the one I seek.” Song and laughter came from outside, but it was not drunken song nor lewd laughter. It was graceful and gentle. The tea-maker wrapped the tea brick in silk cloth and poured boiling water in the black bowl. The tea’s rich, pure scent arose, awakening one of the sleeping elders. He stirred and turned, and let escape from his silk mantle a sand-colored cat he had been keeping warm between his arms and chest. The writing elder picked up a handful of sand and let it slip between his fingers, ponderously.

“This world is a wilderness of mirrors. Everywhere I go, I see the same thing – grotesque simulacra of myself. I see the sharpening and the dulling of swords everywhere I go.” The wakened elder talked softly to the cat in a lost language. The woman took a clear diamond-studded platinum coin from her sleeve and played with it between her old, bony fingers, refracting moonlight into a deceitful multiplicity of stars. The qobyz-player drummed his fingers on the instrument’s box in beat to the music outside.

“Maybe I take violence everywhere I go.” The sleeping elder shifted in his sleep, peacefully. The painter began drawing – loosely, vaguely – a circular labyrinth. The tea-maker poured the tea through white silk. The elder with the long beard pulled a piece of cactus hidden in its depths, nibbled an end, and put it back. His pupils became even more impossibly large. This elder thus spoke:

“You have come to us twice. Few find the way even once.”

“I followed the storm who departs lost, as human ken inside your homelands.”

“You seek closure.”

“I seek to marry the daughter of the man who butchered my clan. I have learned women either love their fathers and sons or their husbands, and thus, causing her to love me is the only way to shift the wheel of generations one notch, making my father-in-law change from winner to loser, and finally end his reign of tyranny.”

The woman elder said, without raising her eyes: “This girl is in a coral cloister with a dragon. She reads him songs tattooed on her body, but whether she dreams the dragon or the dragon dreams her, she will only know when she runs out of songs.”

“But I must stop him, Batyr-of-Femininity. That beast turns the desert brown into black. Everywhere I go I see faces full of hatred and lust of revenge. I don’t see people. If this continues, I’ll be slain by the feigned alterity of mirrors.”

The elder of the cactus told him: “To do the correct deed, we must set you on a path you will not understand. Take this arrow. It is dipped in our greatest cactus-and-the-love-of-the-cactus concoction. It switches the victim’s dreams with those of the sand.”

“Thank you, Batyr-of-Visions.”

“Be still. How would you let fly a true arrow against one you know not where he sleeps? And are you sure this arrow is to be used against your enemy? And you must stalk him from inside his dreams.”

“How will I be able to do that?”

“The Batyr-of-Sleep, who now sleeps, has explained the arrangements.”

The elder painting the labyrinth raised his head and spoke, “It is written: They say that Hoodrazai had heard the murmurs of MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI as he muttered to himself, and gleaned the meaning, and knew; and that he was the god of mirth and of abundant joy, but became from the moment of his knowing a mirthless god, even as his image, which regards the deserts beyond the track of man.”

The Batyr-of-Visions spoke: “The deserts the Batyr-of-Writings speaks of are none other than those of the Light.”

The qobyz-player began playing and singing:

“The roar of Its voice is deafness,

The flash of Its light is blindness...”

“You know how goes the rest of the Batyr-of-Music’s song about the luminous awakening – the terror and the beauty.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You must, if you dare, become one of that Light. It is the only light stronger than that other.”

“Will I sacrifice my mirth?”

“If you really want this.”

“Gladly, then.”

“And then you must sail across the sea of sandglass sand.”

“How long?”

“Longer than long. You must obtain, by whatever means you find, impassivity regarding the passing of sunrises innumerable.”

“Can’t be too difficult for a man with will to meaning. And then what?”

“One day you will be able to experience the ultimate moment of peace, as if watching immaculately white-clad oil princes drift racing. Right then your world will be a dream-world. But it will be a八陣圖 of crystals. Only when the angel of platinum wings and arabesque breath sees the Light shining within you and lifts the shroud from your eyes will you be able to shoot. Shoot true.”

“I now kneel and bow deeply pleading for the Batyr-of-Wisdom to provide me with some dune-pearl to orient me in the thirsty days ahead.”

The tea elder looked at him, then away, and spoke thus: “A sultan summoned a mad rope-maker that was famous among the Sufis. The sultan said: ‘You have two hands and madness. How do you make ropes with only one hand?’ The rope-maker replied: ‘You have hands and two madnesses. How do you dream with only one hand?’”

Mokaddasa was left speechless. The elder with the cat remarked, without lifting his eyes from it: “If you wonder about the meaning of that, the because is the same as that in the oldest tradition: Because wisdom is not much use to a man; wise people do not go further than stupid people in proportion to their intelligence. That’s because there is no room in life to go far; spread open your arms and one hand is in the sun, the other in the mist…”

The Batyr-of-Visions placed his elderly hands on Mokaddasa’s shoulders. “Heed the Batyr-of-Wisdom and the Batyr-of-Beasts. When you are done, whether you still live or not, you know how to return here. We will be here for you to join us, as we lie and wait for all to be unveiled.”

-3-

Though a large part of the sentence is lost, the argument is clear. 'Sleep is like death; so much so, that the fact that the soul sleeps may be used as an argument that it will perish. Therefore sleep is a thing tending to dissolution. But the Gods must be kept free from all things tending to dissolution; therefore the Gods do not sleep.'

The Count was a theater man and an addict, Mokaddasa had heard. Thus he stood in front of his ancient, mossy gateway, crowned by ferocious gargoyles, with jagged, rusty iron teeth and jade eyes, but also with vast, beautiful stained-glass wings, depicting pious scenes of the lives of saints. The gargoyles watched him intently, occasionally flapping their wings for balance, drenching Mokaddasa in shifting colors (it was night-time, but the stained-glass seemed illuminated from within, or as if heaven lay just on the other side). Poisonous caustic dribbled down their maws, and their gaze could petrify, but Mokaddasa had nothing to fear, being kin with the sand.

“Look at how the prismatic emanations do not harm him,” hissed one of the gargoyles.

“He is holy somehow,” hissed another.

“The moon is up over Christ’s Crown. But the sun in his eyes never goes down, like a scar in a quicksilver pool.”

Mokaddasa looked up. “I have crusaded with the Flayer Saint.”

“Ah, that would explain,” grunted the largest gargoyle. “Go in, but know that the hedge maze has its own dangers.”

The blood-encrusted, impalement prone gateway opened. Mokaddasa could sense its hostility. It was some kind of soulful object.

He walked in, into the Count’s maze. The fog intensified, and occasionally Mokaddasa bumped into ivy-covered marble statues, depicting dead child brides with swan wings, or blindfolded, bare-breasted, leather-booted Justices holding a set of scales and a whip, or furious seraphim with lightning-shaped swords and peacock-feathered wings. There were also fountains, with the traditional fat little cherubs or some mythological theme hackneyed by genre.

But he had been through Allah’s great maze, the desert, and thus he made progress, slow but steady.

A raven croaked behind him: “All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it's like being ambushed by a grotesque.”

“Bird of the Word, I imagine you assisted the Count once with his lines.” But he did not turn, and the raven flew off with a velvet sound.

“I’ll not arrive unannounced, at least.”

He reached an archway, bearing the inscription: Even so of winding wayes/ unnumerable Daedalus within his work convayes. Mokaddasa parsed it wrong and smiled at the thought of changing the verse into ‘innumerate Daedalus’. It marked the center of the maze. He went through, and there was a small park, with a thirteen-circuit labyrinth marked in small, white stones in the middle. Six revelers were in the park. One of them, with a red mask, stood at the center of the labyrinth, and the rest, with blue and white masks, stood around it, separated by large, regular intervals. Two of them played: one a tambourine, the other a flute. The tambourine marked a slow cadence, the next beat coming only when the listener despaired of it ever arriving, and the flute’s tune was a no less repetitive loop, maddening for the attentive. At every few beats, one of the revelers outside tossed a stunned fox to the man inside. He took it, walked one step following the circuit towards the exit, and tossed the fox back to another reveler. Those outside danced, laughed and cheered. Mokaddasa watched, entranced. Two gorgeous blond twins, a boy and a girl, four or five years old, played with a swinging seat nearby, beneath an angularly twisted tree. Someone had carved in its trunk:

Aber erweckten sie uns, die unendlich Toten, ein Gleichnis,

siehe, sie zeigten vielleicht auf die Kätzchen der leeren

Hasel, die hängenden, oder

meinten den Regen, der fällt auf dunkles Erdreich im Frühjahr.

Mokaddasa walked across the park, and found a torn page on the ground. He picked it up and read:

“What will become of you?” Dorothy whispered, after a while. “Oh, Jurgen, it was foully done; that which you did was infamous! What will become of you, my dear?”

“I will take my doom,” says Jurgen, “and without whimpering, so that I get justice. But I shall certainly insist upon justice.” Then Jurgen raised his face to the bright heavens. “The man was stronger than I and wanted what I wanted. So I have compromised with necessity, in the only way I could make sure of getting that which was requisite to me. I cry for justice to the power that gave him strength and gave me weakness, and gave to each of us his desires. That which I have done, I have done. Now judge!”

He turned. The music had begun a crescendo and the labyrinth-unraveling reveler was almost at the entrance. The people outside had all danced their way to where he was, forming a half-circle around him. They threw him the fox one last time, he took a step outside, and then they jumped on him. The two musicians played on, not minding. The children continued playing and laughing, closer than he remembered the tree. The others were violently raping the red-masked reveler, tearing swathes of his flesh with their hands and teeth.

When they were done and their victim had stopped moving, they crawled away. They began spitting blood and clawing at their eyes. They screamed agonizingly, and vomited their innards in gushes of blood and bile. They pulled out their own eyes and crushed them between thumb and forefinger. They gnawed their intestines, and their pants were drenched in blood and soil. And almost simultaneously, they expired.

The man they had killed, living despite missing more flesh than medically viable, stood up. He walked slowly, with the rubber ball under his arm. He reached the children and gave it to them. They laughed. He walked back to the center of the labyrinth, sat and waited. The musicians played on, much faster, much fuller of cheer.

Mokaddasa turned his back on the park and left through an archway similar to the one he had previously passed. The maze went on, but he had no time for it (because mazes are beggars of time). He closed his purse of time, and thus he found the exit of the maze. He now stood in front of the palace gates. He saw the family shield overhead, with the motto: There seemed a certainty in degradation, a final safety.

He kicked in the doors, and followed the warmth. He found himself in a study room, where in fire-lit profile the Count sat on a Port-colored leather chair, and in front of him was a tall, lean man, doctoral in appearance, telling him:

“But sir, to think ‘missed memory’ an oxymoron is to misunderstand the essence of absence.”

“But we do have a visitor. Pay attention.”

The man standing bowed down, “I’m Doctor Faut. No, no ‘s’. Just Faut.”

“I am Mokaddasa Tchitcherine. I seek endless life to immanentize avenging dreams.”

“Ho! Without dreams, there could be no despair, wouldn’t you say, Doctor?”

“Yet life unquestioned is life lived in a religious state, o Count,” replied the Doctor, laughing.

“Despair is not questioning, it’s despairing of questioning,” retorted Mokaddasa.

The Count stopped laughing. “Read it to him, Doctor, read that thing.”

Faut read: “Once upon a time in some remote corner of the universe, diffused in countless glittering solar-systems, there was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. After a few breaths of nature, the star congealed and the clever animals had to die. One could invent a story in this way and still not have sufficiently illustrated how wretched, shadowy, transient, pointless, and arbitrary the human intellect appears in nature. Nietzsche.”

“I’m protected from being shadowy,” retorted Mokaddasa.

“…cocooned as he was in a world where the sun always shone bright and uncovered all hidden corners, allowing no shadows or dark and glimmering truths. Read him the other one, Faut.”

The Doctor adjusted his glasses, cleared his throat. “It’s a long one. …life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity. We all live slapstick lives, under an inexplicable sentence of death, and when we try to find out what the Castle authorities want us to do, we are shifted from one bumbling bureaucrat to another. We are not even sure that Count West-West, the owner of the Castle, really exists. More than one critic has commented on the similarities between Kafka’s Trial and the trial of the Jack of Hearts; between Kafka’s Castle and a chess game in which living pieces are ignorant of the game’s plan and cannot tell if they move of their own free wills or are being pushed by invisible fingers. This vision of the monstrous mindlessness of the cosmos (“Off with its head!”) can be grim and disturbing, as it is in Kafka and the Book of Job, or lighthearted comedy, as in Alice or Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. When Sunday, the symbol of God in Chesterton’s metaphysical nightmare, flings little messages to his pursuers, they turn out to be nonsense messages. One of them is even signed Snowdrop, the name of Alice’s White Kitten. It is a vision that can lead to despair and suicide, to the laughter that closes Jean-Paul Sartre’s story “The Wall”, to the humanist’s resolve to carry on bravely in the face of ultimate darkness. Curiously, it can also suggest the wild hypothesis that there may be a light behind the darkness. Laughter, declares Reinhold Niebuhr in one of his finest sermons, is a kind of no man’s land between faith and despair. Gardner.”

“Huh. And that book on your lap, Count?”

“Dawn Dew-light Collected at Dusk by Lu Xun. Nice name to name one’s memoirs, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes. Though my childhood could afford no dew, either morning or of the eyes. No, since then, what I’ve been weeping all these years was… not true. Even so you two try to lecture me on despair and futility, you who lie here like Joubert in a red dressing-gown. Why are you so lame?”

The Doctor mumbled, averting his eyes, “…watching the world through a haze of opium reflected in a hundred thimbles of wine. It is a world where no statement can be made without a pregnant, sensitive, world-weary ellipsis.”

The Count looked straight into his guest. “If she is beautiful, it's because your memories are. You provide the formula. You can only finish where you started, don't forget that.”

“I started in a place so wide there is nowhere else to finish at.” Mokaddasa pointed at Faut. “Have you any regrets, sir?”

“Myself? No, sir, no regrets at all. Errs the man so long as he aspires, and aspiring is inevitable, for obvious ‘dum spiro amo’ reasons! I do not regret the inevitable.”

“As for me,” said the Count, “I don’t know if I know what regrets are. I have a mild aesthetic disappointment regarding my life as a unity, but I feel the same, to some extent, about any other life, with its ridiculous beginning and absurd end. Still, as the saying goes, I wish I had a flamethrower in a couple dozen occasions.”

“Your denial of regrets proves a great lack of introspection. Or, at least, that you’re unable to save and load in life, as in a game. Which is equally foolish.”

“How dare you,” said the Count, “in my own territory, such impertinence? I’ll let you know I delivered like no one else Falstaff’s lines in Henry V! I premiered the most epic adaptation of The Courier’s Tragedy in Noh theater! I played the fiend once, to great acclaim! And- and Moebius, and also vQ once-!”

Mokaddasa raised his right hand and showed them a scar from the Light.

“…that you may learn how much the mightiest I am among you. Try me and find out for yourselves. Hangs me a golden chain from heaven, and lay hold of it all of you, gods and goddesses together- tug as you will, you will not drag Jove the supreme counselor from heaven to earth; but were I to pull at it myself I should draw you up with earth and sea into the bargain, then would I bind the chain about some pinnacle of Olympus and leave you all dangling in the mid firmament. So far am I above all others either of gods or men.”

“Faut, give me my medicine!”

The Doctor went to the Count and took a syringe. They proceeded with what had, somewhen, become a religious ritual with its own twisted dignity. When the syringe had left the Count’s arm, he looked rejuvenated, prouder.

“Flow slow… boy, I’ll give you a chance to retract yourself. He hath no eyes, the dust hath blinded them. What say you?”

“No, Count,” said Mokaddasa.

“Then what will be your punishment, let me think…”

Doctor Faut spoke, “It suggests a kind of existential equilibrium, a philosophical zero point that is neither optimistic or pessimistic. In its place it suggests a stable, immutable moment of truth that is always already real, because it is in a state of existing in the present. You remember that, Count?”

As reply, the Count began reciting, with a hungry grin at first, but quickly becoming paler, as if realizing a great mistake. “Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on…” For as he spoke, the scar in his visitor’s hand began shining with a fraction of the Light.

“I will buy immortality with what I think the Batyr-of-Wisdom taught me about his domain.”

The Count continued mumbling, as if not listening. “Sleep, death of each day’s life, balm of hurt minds…”

“The world is a mutation, what Buddha called a burning house. And as once written: I know that homes burn and that you should think what to save before they start to. Not because, in the heat of it, everything looks as valuable as everything else. But because nothing looks worth the bother, not even your life.”

There was a moment of silence, and then the Count recited, somberly: “And our little life is rounded with sleep.”

“Or, more generally: I know that wisdom does not save us from anything and that all wisdom is like a man’s day: the further it is from one night, the closer it is to another.”

Both Faut and the Count now remained silent.

“It's 10:25,” began Mokaddasa.

“And I've got nothing left to lose,” the Count completed automatically. The Doctor faced away into their flickering shadows, lethargic with the enduring cold.

The guest extended his hands.

“Give me the long wake.”

And the Count gave him the long wake.

The Count and the Doctor watched Mokaddasa from a window. He stood in front of the maze, closed his eyes, looked upwards and said, “O Earth, O Earth, return!” And then there was only a crumbling statue of dirt where he had stood.

“And yet such men find such hallucinations a blessing, for they give warning of a skewed reality. How much worse to slip – to just slip, as if slouching in your chair, as if blinking – into madness with no immediate sign that you had done so,” commented the Doctor.

“It was dark. It was beautiful. It looked like a sleek, black manta ray with cat-like amber-red eyes. It looked like a stealth bomber given flesh. It looked like the most elegant, the wisest creature in the world. And it had come out of him, out of his darkness,” replied the Count.

“And at the bottom of each of those eyes I lived, or rather another me lived, one of the images of me, and it encountered the image of her, the most faithful image of her, in that beyond which opens, past the semiliquid sphere of the irises, in the darkness of the pupils, the mirrored hall of the retinas, in our true element which extends without shores, without boundaries,” completed the Doctor.

The Count nodded very slowly. “But, the unseen world and that which we can see are like a water-drop which instantly is and is not. A water-drop was formed when time began, and on its surface swarmed the world’s appearances. If they were made of all-resisting iron they would fade; hard iron is mere water, after all – dispersing like a dream, impalpable.”

“Do you need more heroin?”

“Yes.”

-4-

It seemed to imply the existence of a light somewhere, some inconceivable distance away, of a spectrum that would have withered or perhaps ennobled the world.

Mokaddasa walked in the deep fog with his eyes closed and his left hand on the hilt of a curved dagger. He had a yellow cape over his shoulders, and several rings in his ears and nose of wine-hued metal that were painful in the freezing cold. A vest of amber and mother-of-pearl was over his purple velvet shirt, and his white boots were almost knee-high and each with a gun holster holding a black semi-automatic. He climbed warily the slippery, slippery slope to the top of Herwendown Barrow.

“In this dark world and wide”, remembered Mokaddasa. Arms reaching out for support that isn’t there. “Then came human beings, they wanted to cling but there was nothing to cling to.”

He walked more and more; the morning was giving way to afternoon, but the mist gave no sign of thinning. He sang in his sightlessness:

Green, green the grain

Growing on grave mound slopes;

If in life you gave no alms

In death how do you deserve a pearl?

and laughed. Finally he arrived at a single erect stone, which he felt with his outstretched right arm, and he opened his eyes.

“I wonder if we are fairy folk to God,” he said aloud, “dim products of imagination, and mysterious.” He stood beside the stone for over an hour in contemplation, before he reached out his hand to touch it again, speaking, “I would study with thee the mystery of celestial bodies, the geometry of birds… Hah!... what fool ‘quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph’?”

He focused on the surface under his fingers. It was icy but the texture of stone always delighted him.

Nothing happened. The wind still whistled around him, and the sunlight was still diffused in the mist, leaving everything illuminated unto invisibility. There was still wet grass beneath his boots, and its scent still lifted up into his nostrils in funereal melancholy.

The Son of God, the legends said, had at this point on Earth descended into hell to free the righteous held captive. The first step of apocatastasis, the reconciliation of good and evil. Gilgamesh, God’s Son, sharpened His sword sternly, fair face full of judgment just and terrible; He harried Hell, trod and trampled devils and demons, dyeing His glorious garments crimson, crushing the deities of darkness and deathly dread, of abyssal horror, to save sinners. But the last demon was the demon of Sleep, and its sting pricked Gilgamesh’s foot, and Gilgamesh fell asleep for eternity. The souls of the righteous brought him out of hell, to this place, and erected this burial mound. The souls form the mist; they are cold and lonely, and weep in happiness for being in such a beautiful cold and such a beautiful loneliness, and silence; and they are forever caught in that delicious creeping stillness that precedes ultimate peace, and such is the freedom the Son of God brought them, and their thankfulness is unending.

Mokaddasa sat against the stone and slowly surrendered to sleep.

He remembered, as he plunged deeper and deeper into unconsciousness, something he did not recall ever having heard or read: Now “Faërian Drama” – those plays which according to abundant records the elves have often presented to man – can produce Fantasy with a realism and immediacy beyond the compass of any human mechanism. As a result their usual effect (upon a man) is to go beyond Secondary Belief. If you are present at a Faërian drama you yourself are, or think that you are, bodily inside its Secondary World. The experience may be very similar to Dreaming and has (it would seem) sometimes (by men) been confounded with it. But in Faërian drama you are in a dream that some other mind is weaving, and the knowledge of that alarming fact may slip from your grasp.

And again: Perhaps they are angels; and they will destroy as angels destroy, without hatred, without pleasure in carnage, simply obeying orders from above, with their fire sword, heart made of diamond, that nothing dulls, but nothing softens. However, they can also have evolved only in the direction of the beast, and like beasts in the quintessence of perfection they will be ferocious and implacable – they will be the very scions of Leviathan.

And again: G.K. Chesterton did rather better when, in an article defending fairy stories, he disputed the suggestion that stories tell children that there are monsters. Children already know there are monsters, he said. Fairy stories tell them that monsters can be killed.

And again: The Buddha spake, “Sometimes they seized a dog by two of its legs/ and beat it till it had lost its voice,/ or planted their feet on the dog’s neck,/ terrifying it for their own delight.”

Mokaddasa had a confusing dream about a black dictator speaking on television. “We have to combine these strengths,” he said, and to illustrate raised his hands parallel and placed his fingertips together, and something in the gesture he made was so careful, so unexpectedly tender, that the pause seemed longer than it really was, everyone held their breath – he expertly crafted that effortless gesture to fully illustrate a point – the fingers formed two sides of a triangle, out of two hands he built a house, lasting less than one full second – conveyed inexpressibly the offering of love and attention of his leadership, and yet he continued barely without interruption, the gesture lost to all who blinked, “and use them both to build our nation, build a future for our nation.”

Alarms rang in the capital city, an Incan mountaintop metropolis with streets paved in gold and sickle-and-hammer flags hanging from crosses. “This is the panic office. Section 9:17 may have been hit, activate the following procedure.” In Mokaddasa’s hands was a piece of paper with a header: How to disappear (completely) and a series of numbered steps.

An old woman wearing a fez spun madly while a golden monkey turned a lever. Jewel-like beetles swarmed the streets, and a tsunami of coffee spiced with pepper came behind them.

He plunged.

Now the dictator had his two eyes in his left palm and his mouth in his right palm, and no face, and he had sunken to his knees in a boiling puddle of blood. “Desolation verging on despair may be the fate of the visitor who would rashly venture into Faërie,” he said. “Mad sacred cow disease. Silken nets and traps of adamant, bitch.”

Mokaddasa leaped up. The mist was thinner, but night had fallen. Mad howling came from all directions around him. He ran, and a body in deep putrefaction leaped on him from the right. Mokaddasa’s hand stopped the attacker in midair by the neck, and his left hand drew a moon-like arc in the air piercing the exposed skull in one sharp blow with the dagger. He rolled forward, taking a firearm and unloading it in the direction of guessed pursuers. Two more had come from either side, and while the leftwards one was dispatched with the dagger, Mokaddasa could only pistol-whip a few times the creature to his right, before turning with a circular kick that knocked it away. In a fraction of time, he dropped the firearm, juggled the dagger from one hand to the other, and got his reserve gun. By then more assailants were around him, and he had to kick, shoot and stab at the same time to keep from being overwhelmed. He leaped on a maggot-spilling head and progressed as if on stepping-stones, until he could make a safe run into the darkness.

He found only one man in his path. The man turned, and a mask of living cockroaches was on his face. He opened his arms, and out of stigmata on his hands crawled out a mass of arthropods, sheathing his arms and torso.

Mokaddasa stepped back, and the masked man opened his mouth, releasing a cloud of wasps, flies and locusts. Mokaddasa ran into the mists murmuring to himself, “It's not for lack of love of the language...”, and suddenly he felt no ground under his feet. He fell a long way.

He crashed into a freezing floor of rough-edged chalcedony tiles, feeling his legs break and needle-like bone shards slice open his flesh. But the pain was irrelevant, and he crawled forward into the burial chamber.

On a horizontal black monolith was Gilgamesh. He had a long, braided, cobalt-colored beard ornamented with once colorful gems, now pale, and a plenty of gold, now turned white. A breastplate of a wine-colored metal still shone as if new, but the plates armoring his battle-skirt, of blessed bronze, were light-green with oxidation and corroded unto perforation. The material of the greaves visually resembled graphite, and the sandals had putrefied aeons ago, leaving only loose metal rings. Bead-laces, several yards long, were wrapped around the ancient body, especially around brow and neck; the beads were pearly white, black or crimson. The skin was covered in a myrrh-scented, gelatinous, blue balm, giving his incarnadine complexion a purplish hue. Both hands were knotted, atop the breastplate, around a long inexistent spear-shaft; now only the gem-studded crystal spearhead remained, resting peacefully on Gilgamesh’s dusty beard as if on a velvet cushion. The hands had many rings, some of them with harmonious moons orbiting softly, timelessly; one bore the sign of the coati of Helarxe of Akedia in ivory. On his brow, barely visible under the knots of bead-laces, was the crown of the God of Gods and King of Kings.

“You sleep peacefully, but do you dream? Once I dreamt many things, a universe almost; once of the things was a black sea under a starless sky, and floating on a raft, lonely, was the one I loved, forever asleep. She dreams I am with her, even now. Or the story was another: the universe had died but for me, but I slept in suspended animation in that raft, in that sea, under that sky, which had no stars: and my duty was to dream the universe with everyone in it, so it would not be dead; but the condition was that I were not in the universe. But although I wasn’t there, she dreamt – when she slept – I was with her, and that was enough.” Mokaddasa sighed. “You were stung by Būšyãsta, and his ring crowns your hand. Well, a sage once said ‘There is no happy reality worth the tenth part of a good dream’. But then again, someone else, perhaps Huxley, also said: ‘Our job is waking up’.”

And so Mokaddasa recited:

 

Phototaxis

 

Inexorable, the river only returns to the mountains over the Milky Way.

I sit here, friend, idly thinking:

Is it necessary to sail the arc of morn, the weeping, the silence?

 

Meanings for life with no one to share

To redeem this nightbound world

In the philosophers' garden; night falls, and all I thought was a stick.

 

Ephemerous dew every morning returns, the dead do not,

I feel my way in the dark, aiming to return, to warn of the dangers in a face.

Is it necessary to sail the arc of morn, the weeping, the silence?

 

In dreams one must choose between eyes and hands.

We leave footprints in the snow as lonely proof we have not lived on our knees

In the philosophers' garden; night falls, and all I thought was a stick.

 

Inexorable, the river only returns to the mountains over the Milky Way;

Ephemerous dew every morning returns, the dead do not;

Moths, seeking light, never reach the stars.

 

We leave footprints in the snow as lonely proof we have not lived on our knees,

Meanings for life with no one to share

In the philosophers' garden; night falls, and all I thought was a stick.

 

In dreams one must choose between eyes and hands.

I feel my way in the dark, aiming to return, to warn of the dangers in a face.

Moths, seeking light, never reach the stars.

 

I sit here, friend, idly thinking -

To redeem this nightbound world -

Is it necessary to sail the arc of morn, the weeping, the silence?

 

Gilgamesh stirred, but did not awake; Mokaddasa said aloud, “Of course, Charon has a brother, an equally toll-charging boatman who ferries across the confusion, forgetfulness and peace between wake and sleep and sleep and wake – a two-way ferry, unlike his brother – at least usually. Another poem nobody remembers ends with the line, ‘I whisper in dreams’.” He crawled away down a side passage, and found a wide cistern with blue nenuphars thriving from time immemorial, and blind white fish with attentive whiskers, and at the bottom, many silver coins, of which he took a handful. As soon as they left the holy waters, there was a sound of thunder, and Mokaddasa turned in awe, and standing in the passageway was Gilgamesh.

Mokaddasa opened his mouth and said, not of direct volition, “Hail and well met, primordial paragon of kingship! In summer thou art the zephyr that freshens the people’s toil, in winter thou art the flame of passion that warms the hearts of even the miserable plebeians whose songs are crude and joys, shallow! In autumn thou art the grateful immediacy of birth, in spring thou art the sobering memory of death. Hail!”

Gilgamesh stood immobile.

Mokaddasa felt a buzzing around his head. He mumbled, “The inevitable consequence is that anyone who visits the Crucifixion will find Christ surrounded by thousands, if not millions, of time travellers.” He laughed. “There is nothing that is not as if lost in a maze of indefatigable mirrors.”

And he started feeling a warmth from the King of Kings – he was reminded of Baisei’s death poem, where he invented a verb, hatsu-hinata, ‘basking in the first rays of New Year’s Day’, and Mokaddasa made up an onomatopoeia for the waking of a God: hzg.

He then said, “And when the unclean shall be no more, what were modesty but a fetter and a fouling of the mind?” to which Gilgamesh smiled.

Mokaddasa experienced peace, and disappeared (not completely).

 

 

The Passion Of The Wholly Caustic: A Martyrpunk Nightmare

-1-

From within and without, from above and below,

And all at once to the Bishop they go.

Major Sophróne breathed heavily in the crowded transport, his legs pained from standing for thirty-two hours, his lungs pained from the humid, cold pseudo-conditioned air, and his intestines revolting against all that is fair and blissful after his last squirming down to the Hades of hope that were the transport’s toilets.

Sophróne was squeezed between the broad stevedore backs of two rough frontiersmen in the Queen’s Marines, the tip of one’s xaser rifle pressed against his thigh so piercingly and for so long Sophróne was reminded of when he was a child, sleeping with his hand clenched and beneath his body, he woke up to find a nasty crescent-shaped cut in his palm, where his nail had hurt him. It was a wound carried over from a dream into a false awakening, and then into the actual awakening, like the scratches the claws of some dream-panthers are said to inflict.

He thought, “We feel the harm during our dreams, but cannot stop it being done until we wake up. But what if the harm is caused in the dream, and the waking world just emulates the effect?...” But the pain against his thigh kept him from pursuing these thoughts downstream. He leaned his head against the cold hardness of the metal wall, and tried to sleep, using a method once read in a Gamezohan Efficiency Trance manual, of drawing with a finger the pathway into a classic seven-circuit labyrinth while knotting, in the mind’s eye, a web pattern with eight strands, one for every finger (discounting thumbs) and focusing one’s heart on the question, “where is the eighth circuit? Why can I only find the false solution to the labyrinth?”

But just as he was fading into dreams and thus rediscovering the answer, the vodka-soaked voice of the captain came over on intercom, gibbering the imminent arrival. The ship landed on the uneasy, rocky gray ground of planet Meicht, and the troops in the military camp all around hurried and formed a line, eager to take their leave from what was widely acknowledged as the worst place to be stationed, of all places where the Wendauerian military acted. All who were sent here had some higher authority displeased.

Major Sophróne stepped outside and was amazed that the air was worse than that within the transport ship. Terraforming had gone on for long, but never with too much enthusiasm – why waste resources with a mining penal colony? being the rationale. After the civil unrest, the penal colony became even more so, even more itself: where the damnati are buried and forgotten.

“No,” Sophróne thought tiredly, “that’s not all of it. That is preceded by a long period of torture.”

-2-

…it will not find the dazzling, arrogant creature who is tormenting it and whom the crowd admires for his splendour and cunning…

He walked aimlessly, half-hoping for a formal reception, for some officer to show him around, to take him where work would be done: Facility Negatur. But while discipline and hierarchy there were unyieldingly strict, the soldiers here were physically exhausted and also deep within the emotional exhaustion stage; and this was a stage the fierce, rugged Wendaeuriean soldiers had never known before Facility Negatur opened shop.

The psychological damage meant no-one saluted the major, no-one heeded his pleas for information. Sophróne sat at the bar in the outdoor cafeteria (it never rained) and asked for a mug of cappuccino. The frothing mud that passed as such on Meicht was served, and then the corporal in service looked over Sophróne’s shoulder, and his eyes glazed over, and he turned and busied himself with the deep-fried eggs, the charred beef, the dusty coffee.

Sophróne, admiring the curious mix of ennui and primal fright paralyzing his limbs, did not move. He heard the clicking of heels, the choir of sinking angels that accompanies feline female steps of long legs in long boots, and the soft rasp of a leather trench-coat, like that of men buried alive at their coffin lids, when they are not sure they want out. This last image made Sophróne think, “A closed door is the smallest possible labyrinth.” He swallowed the sandy cappuccino. “Or is it a closed mind?”

The woman sat beside him, and although peripheral vision is black and white, Sophróne could safely guess her straight, waist-long hair was as radically, racially blue as his. He remarked quietly her strong jaw, but avoided consciously appraising her eyes.

“Corporal Langeais, pour me some Thaynese tamarind juice.”

“Yes, sir.” Sophróne could hear the man’s surprise at being known by name, as if he’d heard and told legends about that uncanny ability that officer possessed, but never entirely believed it.

Sophróne thought that, when it comes to the point of tossing oneself against the rocks to be broken into a filthy stain, one might as well do so out of one’s own initiative. He turned to the woman, saying, “Good day, I’m Major Sophróne Bornemisja.”

Her uniform indicated she was a major as well. She looked at him impassively, and he could not avoid her eyes, thinking, “‘Ice on fire’ tells nothing – they look like the heat death of the universe, which is then cast into the infinite pool of hellfire.”

“The new psych chaplain, I see.” She extended her glove-clad hand. Sophróne shook it. Her glare, which he had thought piercing, revealed a whole new dimension of penetration, ripping him apart. “I want to see your papers,” she explained icily.

“Right, of course you would,” said Sophróne, dismissively. He pulled the documents out of his vest and obliged.

“We were expecting you,” she said. “I examined your records. Quite the hero, aren’t you. And with such a scholarly background, no-one would expect it.”

“Thank you. The Mi-Go are unkind.”

“What have you done to get sent here?”

“Something dreadful and against nature. You?”

“I volunteered.”

Sophróne smiled, closed his right hand and discreetly beat his chest until his heart started pumping again. “Oh, really? That’s… uncommon.”

She did not reply, examining his documents minutely. Finally, she returned them. “Welcome, major. I’m acting colonel Obrieri, Loyalty Commissar. Since I’m also in charge of torture and other spiritual affairs, you’ll be reporting to me.”

“Outstanding.” Sophróne finished his lukewarm drink. “I imagine I won’t be working with the inmates, though?”

“The psych chaplain is usually here to tend for the troops, but I might consult your opinion on a case now and then. We are, unfortunately, a bit short on qualified officers.”

“Well, that’s what I’m here for. How’s morale?”

“Sufficient. I set up the schedules and procedures and our troops carry them out, asking for my intervention only when there’s a particularly difficult nut to crack. As good patriots, they rarely object. However, I have had to hold my hand when preparing the schedules, leaving some of the more distasteful procedures out, some that were eroding the moral fiber of our men too fast. With your assistance, I hope that will not be necessary any longer.”

“I hope I can help,” said Sophróne, hollowly.

“I don’t doubt you will, if you commit yourself to it.”

“What about your morale,” he asked, looking for any gaps in her armor. “Would you like some of the new GUI-pills? They eliminate 80-110% of guilt. Darian-Marik’s research, fine Pherke Pharmaceuticals stuff. Gamezohan research is far ahead of ours in that area. Their soldiers are almost as alien to moral qualms as ours, but they have easily offended aesthetic sensitivities.”

But he could not draw any emotion, no sign that she shared the vulnerabilities he had thought common to all beings (even the Mi-Go, even AIs), a thought that had been solace and sufficiency yet now left him bereft of north and sense. He felt nausea and static in his brain. He did not hear her answer. He needed drugs.

“Well, I need drugs, major. Awful trip. Awful coffee. I’m sorry, I think I’m going to…”

-3-

…after the last of the leaves, whose autumnal glory led him, as many a cause in its latter days, all splendid and fallen, leads all manner of men…

Sophróne settled in quickly. He inherited the notes of Dr. Evengirth, his predecessor who had died of self-inflicted white phosphorus grenade wounds. In POW camps, the first note observed, the guards are far more likely to become psychiatric casualties than the prisoners. It’s as if the latter’s being excused from partaking in war released a great burden. This is not the case in facility Negatur.

In fact, Sophróne noticed, Evengirth had divided the prisoners in two categories. In one category, all prisoners had become psychiatric casualties of one type or another. Such prisoners often recanted, confessed and denounced their collaborators (which didn’t mean they were released or survived at all). The other was apparently more resistant, with the only typical ailment being what Evengirth had cryptically described only as ‘religious hysteria’.

The prisoners in that category, Sophróne observed, were all in the facility because of the Great Treason.

He proceeded to have interviews such as:

“Good morning.”

No answer.

“How are you doing?”

No answer.

“If you could choose between feeding an upside-down turtle in the snow salmon and mayo temaki or washing an itchy part of your skin with rose-scented black Ceylon tea, which would you choose?”

No answer.

“What is your favorite pastoral novella by a Zardarkian author?”

No answer.

“A persecuted man once wrote, ‘…without these one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth…’. If you had written that, what would you be referring to?”

The morbidly thin, bald man, fragile after much mistreatment, raised his one good eye. “I have seen the Shroud.”

Sophróne took some notes. “You all seem to repeat that mantra.”

“We have all seen it. We have seen the Shroud.”

“Is there a God?”

“Yes.”

“Arguable, isn’t it? Or rather, quite lacking in evidence, wouldn’t you say? Some… imagination is required.”

No answer.

“Some sects believe in a ‘cryptogod’, a hidden god, who chooses to disguise his existence, to have a world where everything can be explained both with him existing and without. The ultimate trial of faith. Absolutely no reason at all to believe. The ultimate conspiracy. Of course, since god is omnipotent, he’ll be hidden forever, and all our theological efforts are futile. He’ll be hidden beyond human intelligence, beyond logic, thought, and language. He’ll be hidden forever, or maybe just until he chooses to reveal himself. Is this lifting of a veil the type of shroud you are referring to?”

No answer.

“What kind of Wendauerian would betray his Queen?”

“I am loyal only to Adamus, for he was Prophet.”

“Convenient for him.”

“No. He was martyred. He died for our faith. It wasn’t unexpected. Neither is this.”

“This interview?”

“Our Devouring in this concentration camp, I mean.”

Sophróne clicked his pen a little obsessively. “So there is a god?”

“There were more.”

“How many? Three? Myriads?”

“Four.”

Sophróne took note. “Corresponding to aspects? Elements?”

“No. Just four gods. Similar and dissimilar in different, irrelevant things.”

“Alright.”

“The gods have abandoned this world. The wheels that spin our fate have slowed to a halt. Soon there will be no more.”

“No more firmament?”

The man looked piercingly at Sophróne. “There’s only one God left and he’s frustrated.”

The chaplain quoted musingly: “I am alone: there is no God where I am.”

“I have seen the Shroud.”

“Back to the cryptogod. They say mundus vult decipi. The world wishes to be deceived. Quite an accurate epistemological observation.”

“God is not hidden. There is evidence for those who are not blind. I have seen the Shroud.”

Sophróne tore a page from his notebook. “Next topic. I will give you something to think about, I want you to meditate about these topics for some thirty seconds, and then tell me what you feel. Meditate on – I quote – ‘…on the fleeting illusion of a lovers’ embrace, on the horror of spilt seed, on the impotence of the aging tiger…’ No rush.”

“I feel… it is… crucial to reject the infliction of suffering.”

“Why?”

“To shame God. To take a higher moral ground that Him. Because he – and the other gods – inflict such things on us all.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re assholes.”

“Hookay,” said Sophróne. “The Simonian Gnostics claim that, first of all things, God had his first thought, Ennoia, whom the angels, rebelling out of jealousy, trapped in the material world. The Simonians despised matter. They sought to learn to leave the flesh.”

“That’s easy. What’s difficult is to learn to leave the text.”

“Leave the… text?”

“Invade and change forever a god’s mind, escaping this fiction and moving up one semiotic-ontological level, to the level of fiction where the gods exist.”

“A memetic version of the soul? Cute.”

“Until then, since this world is what we have, and this world is all we will have in these incarnations, we should seek to love one another. Because the gods can’t be relied upon for love.”

Sophróne pulled a card from his briefcase. It had a picture of a rose on it. “Comment. The rose is a symbol,” he began reading, “of Dawn, of the Resurrection of light and the renewal of life, and therefore the dawn of the first day, and more particularly the Resurrection; the cross and the rose together are therefore hieroglyphically to be read, the Dawn of Eternal Life which all nations have hoped for by the advent of a Redeemer.”

“Don’t you see? Redemption is Their game. Resurrection is Their game – life and death are the Gods’ playthings,” the man started crying.

“So the game is endless and ruthless: and there is merriment overhead, but it is very far away,” quoted Sophróne soothingly.

“Even Dawns are Their game. Cue the sun. Fade up music. The Gods will put us in the way of danger and save us, or not; will make us suffer for a great cause, for petty things or for nothing; will make us be passionate about quests that ultimately are up to them. Only Adamus taught us to rebel, to resist, to rage against their omnipotence, their spinning of our fates. To be kind to one another knowing who are our true enemies.”

“Does it even make any logical sense, you Adamusites’ attempt resist omnipotence and fate?”

“I refer you to Stendhal’s image of the author as the hunting dog that takes the prey within range of the protagonist’s rifle, but can only hope he will shoot.”

“Unexpectedly literate, your image.”

“I was a writer once; poet, lover, philosopher once; friend, asshole, son, student once. But I have seen the Shroud.”

“Cue the sun. Fade up music.”

The prisoner looked sadly at Sophróne. “I told you – only one God is overseeing this right now. He is frustrated and hesitant. He is allowing this, which He could end with one wave of his hand. He has his weapons, of course – Loyalty Commissar Natasya Obrieri, the meanest person He could devise. She has killed tens of thousands of us. Methodically but with cold passion. She has tortured us all, but we can’t recant as we have seen the Shroud. But this God must feel we are right to some extent. He must be willing to learn, or to be punished. We don’t know. It is a moment of cosmic chaos. A conflict They had designed to unfold in a controlled fashion has escaped His hands. He knows not how it will end, and it disturbs Him immensely. Should He care at all, He wonders, but He knows He does. This frustration can be dangerous to us. He will unleash evil in large amounts upon us, death, or our making things we wouldn’t, of our volition. He will unleash confusion and insanity, the worst plague of all. Is it a cry for help from the other Gods? Does He know that what He makes of our world is what He will make of Himself? There is a fearful symmetry involved.”

“What can I reply to such a level of metaphysical abstraction? Nothing. Here’s all I think of you and your kind.” Sophróne stretched his arms. “Technology. Human artifacts. Let me read you a quote I find inspiring. But [technology] also does something much more adventurous, potentially poetic, trying to bring about marriages between human intelligence and the mysteries of nature. Occasionally these marriages show quite marvelous intuition, as amazing as any we find in the world of the arts. So we should not say that working with things is so much simpler than working with people, that there is nothing to be learned from it from the point of view of our emotions, our depressions, or our anger.”

No answer.

“But words, behaviors – memes, generally – are also technology. History has witnessed the power of new ideas. A man equipped with the proper tools is much more intelligent, but ideas are tools of thought. And this leads me to my theory. Technology is usually an instrument of tyranny, because tyranny is the natural condition. Blake, glossing Hobbes, rejected that the Leviathan is a response to the horrors of the natural condition, rather it is one manifestation of these horrors. But at every period, new technology is also used to fight the legacy of tyrannical order. In one period, mass media was used in such a manner in a phenomenon dubbed punk, and it had such and such contingent features. But it stuck as the only word we have for that phenomenon, and so new terms were coined, some more apt than the others. Steampunk, cyberpunk.”

No answer.

“A new religious idea can trigger a beautifully radical revolution. Purging fires follow in its wake. Few things can lead so many men to willing self-sacrifice. Belief is a very powerful thing indeed. Imperial strength may try to suppress it through brutality, but it will only make the faith stronger. What lofty heights of detachment. So much charity. Such purity when compared to the violent and debauched temporal monarchs. Even Nietzsche had to take off his hat to the half-conscious cunning of it all.”

No answer.

Sophróne gathered his things and stood up. Right before leaving, he turned and said:

“I call the genre martyrpunk.”

He left and told the guards:

“Euthanatize him.”

-4-

That anxiety was consuming me when I remembered the jaguar was one of the attributes of the god.

“New Adamusites are sent here every day now. They are appearing all around the Kingdom. Many flee to Gamezohan territory, protected by religious refugee acts. That so-called Empire is lenient to the absurd, way past the futility boundary.” Obrieri paced in front of a vast window to the brutally indifferent icescape, one deadliness framed by another, leather making feeble sounds. “Blind converts. ‘I think, therefore I am the creator god’ subjectivist puppies. ‘And see, no longer blinded by our eyes’ will-infirm theomaniacs. Are they not afraid of this facility? Is our reputation not frightful enough?”

“I’m certain we do frightful things here and make no secret of it, sir.”

“All under the Queen’s authority. These are traitors of civilization, major. I had two brothers who died fighting the Mi-Go. In a volunteers suicide regiment.”

“Patriots to the bone marrow, doubtlessly, sir.”

“You could say that. You could also say they were just trying to end their fear of me.”

Sophróne swallowed hard. “You, sir, are without doubt the most zealous servant of Her Majesty I have had the honor of meeting.”

She raised her hands, long fingers outstretched. “These hands have, in Her service,–what is unspeakable and impossible–literally. They have done dark miracles. Religions have begun and ended for what they have done, religions sentience as we know it would not have survived.”

“Having seen your handiwork, I agree it is somewhat extreme but sadly necessary, sir. But perhaps fear can’t conquer all. These religious fellows are especially known for their parataxis, as one ruler once observed in a not dissimilar context.”

She snorted. “Well, how do you think this will end, this summer-time of treason?”

“Well,” Sophróne passed both hands through his blue hair, “we could ask for help from Gamezohan Memetic Counter-Insurgency. We could also watch it unfold. Won’t last forever. A future singularity will occur, a new prophet or messiah. No dogma outlives its age without adaptation.”

“Your conclusion?”

“We just have to be around when the next leader appears. And deal with him.”

She smiled after the song of the chilling-needles.

-5-

…one “could feel no impulse from history to any further life or work, for [one] would have recognized the blindness and injustice in the soul of the doer as the condition of every deed.” A certain impotence, Nietzsche suggests, will inhere in an approach that views every unironic investment, be it in words, persons, or causes, as a form of fetishism.

Sophróne read to the prisoner:

“Non-dual (Advaita) answers to the problem of evil: Non-dual mysticism answers the question of theodicy by maintaining that every seemingly separate person is in fact a thought, dream, or experience of God. God creates and becomes / experiences each creation, deliberately limiting itself to a specific identity in space and time to undergo a particular life experience. Therefore it is God who experiences every pain, suffers every indignity, dies every death, experiences the illusion of being each separate individual. Does it mean anything to you?”

The prisoner shook his head.

“What can you say about the first line in the Adamusite Koran?” Sophróne held his glasses in one hand while lifting the small handwritten napkin to the light. “‘Perhaps the first example, the current goal, the sky bridge is the same for him.’”

The prisoner said, “It is about…” And then he held his tongue.

“About the god that can’t be relied upon for love, I assume. You do know a Sleeping God faith has affinities with an empty Cola can, don’t you? Moving on. For Wang, however, Nature is beautiful because it is the last stop on the mind's itinerary out of this world. What do you say to that?”

“Nature is the first stop of the gods when they intrude with their keys tap-tapping a landscape, a plot, this place into being.”

…doth grow, in effect, into another nature, Sophróne thought, and said, “I’d imagine they begin with a character’s name, perhaps a weary character breathing heavily, maybe in ominous or absurd circumstances…”

The prisoner shrugged. “You may well know a god’s mind better than I. I was just a soldier from silent hinterland. I could have earned to be called Alamgir and made flutes out of the bones of all Wendauerians to play in a feast to me, but why aspire to things? Why accomplish, if it only entertains those for whom we are entertainment? Some mystagogues of my land used a bit of illustrative dialogue to teach us: ‘He is not compassionate.’ ‘How can he be? He has come and gone. Kings are simply a part of that distracting puppet show that the perfect one no longer attends.’ But our God is the opposite, He attends the puppet show and that is why He is not compassionate.”

“You’re not a very good Adamusite, I gather.”

“I haven’t seen it, if you’re wondering. I’m still lulled.”

“You are lucky. Those who have seen… The V shaped device to crush people, legs first (the psychic torture timed perfectly to deny even the tiny relief usually felt right after the knees pop)… since it broke from overuse, Obrieri has been giving free hand to new concepts. I recall a woman with her face cut out surgically among a score other patients, searching through the pile for her boy’s, trying to earn that re-implant for him by tearing as many as she could with her teeth like some undead from the fables. And that batch was lucky…”

Staring into darkness together. The prisoner said, “I think…”

He made a choking sound.

“I can see it.”

Sophróne took a deep gulp of coffee, stretched his neck both ways, rubbed his baggy eyes tiredly and then turned around looking over his shoulder, just in case, before returning to the tick boxes before him.

“You still there?”

“You could say that.”

“Anything expressible in words you can say about your religious experience just there?”

“I hated god-ness. Now I don’t. Eh, words may pour away now and I don’t vouchsafe their meaning anymore. Like some obverse Iago, I refuse to convey any sense in words anymore for the rest of my lines.”

Sophróne noted down a certain inconsistency in the numbering of gods in Adamusite doctrine in some sects away from the battlefront. His hand trembled a little stamping the cremation form, and he raised his pharmaceuticals to the next spectrum.

-6-

Even suffering had lost its poignancy. And no ends seemed worth pursuing that could not be realized speedily. The sting had gone out of experience. The soul was calloused against every goad. Men and women worked and played, loved and suffered; but always in a kind of rapt absent-mindedness. It was as though they were ever trying to remember something important which escaped them. The affairs of daily life seemed too trivial to be taken seriously. Yet that other, and supremely important thing, which alone deserved consideration, was so obscure that no one had any idea what it was.

“With you,” said Sophróne, “we’ll try the Gongsun Bi test.”

The prisoner made no response.

“Close your eyes and imagine, please, you are a cloud of very thin monads, a demiphysical soul of a shipwrecked conqueror, who has spend a billion years coursing through the mutations of a living landscape of unrivalled beauty and the works of a passionate and vital race in countless civilizations.”

He continued, “Then, over the course of these mutations, despite your thoughts being geologically slow and fainter than a happy man’s dream, you cognize that it is your presence that energizes all that is good in the landscape. Millions of years later, you also understand all the death and decay, the treason and murder, the sins of secrecy and perversity, the disease and dissolution, are all because when you were pulverized as a falling star, also mingled with that wretched earth the monads of your servants. The world is poisoned with galley-slave dust.”

“While ethereally incapable of exerting any effective action into the world, over the course of histories your pervading shock, and guilt, and shame, and urge to cleanse your surroundings – it all shapes the world, gradually, gently, like whispered words of love into a pillow to a girl far away.”

“Your monads are gathered, by a cult of some sort, over the course of masterful spiritual efforts and voluntary sufferings, and distilled and kept in a sticky syrup. The fourth question is, what color is the bear that could earn such a honey? Think about it, but do not answer right now.”

“Eventually you are entirely gathered and, at one point, you awake into a stage of consciousness in a time scale somewhat human. At that point in history, your cult has been destroyed by a great conqueror. What weapon is the favorite of that conqueror? That is the third question.”

“You wander those gloomy, empty halls, the cloisters and the cells, when suddenly you hear the song of an exiled noble maiden, who took refuge there with her blind mother; she sings something while sweeping dirt from the two cells they picked as their rooms. What is she singing?”

“Finally, you begin to approach the maiden, but something distracts you – a mirror she’s put on the wall nearby. You look into it, anon you die once again, gone for countless aeons again. What did you see?”

The prisoner replied, “White. A place like this. A silly song to distract her from the pain in her delicate hands, holding that rude broom. I am made of such pure substance, I slay myself lest my perfection injures her fragile little heart.”

Sophróne leapt up, his chair clanged the cement floor loudly. Guards peeked in cold iron slits.

“You are no Adamusite at all,” he gasped. “They know the right answer at once.”

-7-

All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage.

Sophróne Bornemisja had promptly forwarded the papers of prisoner Damaso to Obrieri, who was inspecting a mine in another continent. He stood in the freezing snow in his major’s uniform with his mouth open like a fool, just standing there in the snow. Damaso was with a chain-gang collecting chunks from people tossed into the perimeter minefield recreationally. It was for lunch. They were scared shitless, but none could feel half as fearful as that man watching them.

He stood watching, hearing nothing, for the rest of what happened. He did not hear the wooden door slam open behind him, didn’t hear the leather moaning as Loyalty Commissar Obrieri took her long strides, made a straight path towards Damaso the prisoner, the condemned one. He didn’t hear the explosion, didn’t hear every guard dive for cover, every Adamusite fall smitten with reverence at the sight of the bewildered Damaso anointed in her blood.

 

 

Gerolamo, or, Culinary Marvels of Yore, or, The Dreams Our City Is Rained Upon From: A Tragedy Of Urbanity

-1-

In terms of bellicosity, and even more so in terms of statements that saw positive aspects in war, there was little to choose between Helmut von Moltke the Elder, chief of staff of a “reactionary,” “authoritarian,” and “militarist” country such as Germany, and Theodore Roosevelt, the popularly elected (and hugely popular) president of the most liberal, democratic, and progressive country of all.

Gerolamo, the importer, opened his bronze-framed third storey window and breathed in the moist morning scents of the Free Polity of Kubrik, spanning the range from fresh shellfish to burnt firework powder from the preparations for Strategos Kochl’s Triumph, to breads fried with cinnamon, wine, milk, groaye egg and algal gelatin, to the sweat of horses, elephants, wormlets and other beasts of burden trafficking busy Starfall Avenue, and, full circle, to not so fresh shellfish. “One day,” he vowed in bated breath as he spun his tie four times around his neck, “all this weather will be under control.” A Syj-Kaklallon of the Extlou Incclo Fellowship, he was one of several moderately powerful entities who planned ahead a healthy future for the city, and its myriad rootless peoples. Planned, perhaps, too strong a word, he thought tying the Albatross’s Phantasmagoria knot; rather they dreamed, and in the dreams toiled, spat, and wrapped dangerous vandella, dangerous vampires of sleep, in their bright yellow dream cloaks, and stabbed them with daggers of jade and fossil resin of dryads’ wet dreams, their handles studded with pearls from the clams the vandella bred for meat and company, clams that took the small particles of epiphany we get in dreams, and wrapped them in layer after layer of opaque milkiness, until they had no value but as currency amongst demons of the dreamscapes, the most secret and exalted of which were those Rakshasas who were fakirs, zazen tea masters, sufis and gymnosophists of the cult of Shri Nidra, those who were almost man-like, but had the head and time of tigers, and worshipped their own vision, as if through a tearful eye darkly, of Unwake, whose skin was made of shadows so as to invite dancing, all night, in a night unending, for endless is the folly of dancing cultists-- whose teeth were gaunt albino lizards’ necks, with curious, blind heads spewing the balsam of Lethê, so that you might taste of it, and forget all you have loved-- whose seven arms each held a fractal scimitar that takes infinite time to sharpen with the sandman’s sand spurting down the hourglass of temporality, scimitars made of Ataraxiargentium, the alloy forged by the Cryptarch of the Platinum City of Risen Angels, so that, after seven whetting eternities have been dreamed by dreamers throughout the universes, the deity’s endless, meaningless, utterly anti-rational spinning dance may tear to shreds all the fibers of love that hold existence together, leaving us atoms drifting, ready to be consumed by Oblivion-- whose cyan, silver and parrot-green mane of gosling down reveals a blood kinship to the Destroyer of Governments, partially conceived by the Persians as Būšyãsta, the demon of sleep and laziness: for such hair will fill your lungs and steal your breath, until you faint within the dream and dream within the faint, and never wake up...

That was one long metaphor, thought Gerolamo, wiping the drool from his chin and preparing to leave. “Master Ecclefèst,” called the young pedelejer page Gerolamo paid to make his things ready every morning, “Does master want me to fetch correspondence of master?”

“It’s alright, Xitz. I’ll get it myself when I leave.”

“I will iron shirts of master today, yes?”

“Good, good. No need to change the bedsheets, though – I fell asleep at my desk. That should leave your washing ahead of schedule.”

“Yes, master. Have a day of goodness at the store.”

“Thank you, Xitz,” Gerolamo said, putting on his five-pointed hat. He fixed the collar of his painfully yellow overcoat, with many pockets and buttons. Pulling up the sleeves, he put on his elbow-length, heavy clear blue gauntlets layered in ballistically irreprehensible synthetic leathers. He flicked switches and turned dials to set up the clocks and alarms that allowed him to navigate time and space of a busy work day, and then rolled down the sleeves. Finally, by the door, he picked up an umbrella to double as walking cane, a one-span-long revolving gun, and put on his Katabasis-brand urban boots, with myriad buckles and defenses against the monstrous city. The boots were sheathed in lotus petals, and thus no mud or dirt, no dust or blood, no urine, vomit or sewage would cling to it – they would remain insultingly immaculate no matter what. The product tagline was “Drift Above.” It was very comfortable, too, as inside it was stuffed with ekhasugde pelts (which warm in the cold and cool in the heat), and durable, and fashionable. It was possibly the most expensive personal possession of Gerolamo Ecclefèst, the importer.

-2a-

Was I doomed to hang thus for ever out in space, a bodiless view-point? Had I died? Was this my punishment for a singularly ineffectual life? Was this the penalty of an inveterate will to remain detached from human affairs and passions and prejudices?

Gerolamo went down the stairs carefully, with occasional feelings of numbness consuming his right, bad leg. He stopped panting in front of his second-storey co-tenant, standing at his open doorway, drinking peppered chocolate from a mug printed I (tentacle) Kubrik. The neighbor’s friendly acne-scarred face opened in a smile.

“Good day to you, Mr. Blaqdepfs.”

“And a joyous diurnal cycle to yourself, Signor Gerolamo. Had a good night, hmm? Got the merry dreams I good-willed your way, yes have you?”

“No, my friend, I dreamt only that the walls were filled with albino cockroaches. They dreamed of my father. He was reading to them: ‘I imposed the false order that hides the chaos, pretending that I was dedicated to a profound existence while all the time it was the one that barely dipped its toe into the terrible waters,’ and then he urinated inside a hollow crystal globe. In the sea of urine there was an island. The island had a block of Cumberland alabaster against which leaned a gorgeous, short pale, gaunt woman, with wild black hair and a perky smile. She wore a shirt that said ‘If the world hates you/ remember it hated me first’, and she was singing to herself, ‘Like the red bouquet slim swinger…’ but was interrupted by the arrival of this tall brooding guy (looking like her) who told her, speaking in a very low tone:

“ ‘A pangram is a locution containing all letters in the alphabet. It is particularly prized in occult circles as the alphabet contains, in potentia, all possible formulations. Some of my favorites are “sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow” and “waltz, bad nymph, for quick jigs vex”. How’re your lungs?’

“ ‘Fantastic. Do you have food with you?’

“ ‘No. One pangram without repeated letters is “cwm fjord veg balks nth pyx quis”. Lovely, isn’t it? The only verse in the Hebrew sections of the Bible with all Hebrew letters is at Zephaniah 3:8: “Therefore wait ye upon me, saith the LORD, until the day that I rise up to the prey: for my determination is to gather the nations, that I may assemble the kingdoms, to pour upon them mine indignation, all my fierce anger: for all the earth shall be devoured with the fire of my jealousy.” I speak this, of course, because I hate you right now. You are too wise, too easily, to be trusted and not envied, and my jealousy is a raging fire. It consumes me, mostly; but it might burn you, too, if you are carelessly capricious.’

“ ‘Oh. You remember the relationship of Flaubert and Colet? Don’t be Flaubert, and don’t ask me to be Colet. Look, you’re a fine company on occasion and have delicate hands, and that’s more than can be said about most beings. Let us savor our wounds before the dawn heals us. Just as there are inescapable ills, there are equally overwhelming, humbling, inescapable redemptions.’

“ ‘And we want to avoid that, don’t we?’ He hugged her loosely and briefly. My father then took a lead club, with the head shaped like a rose and Dawamesk inscribed in it, and asked the cockroaches if they wanted him to destroy the globe. They said no, unanimously. And then my father wasn’t my father anymore, but rather a green-haired witch, who chanted, as if reciting:

“ ‘My celestial lover measures what ill others have done to us, I, here on earth, measure what ill we have done to ourselves, and the dark lover of my song measures what ill we have done to others.’

“She raised the globe and the cockroaches became light. Just like that. And they were sucked into the globe. I could feel what they were feeling – they felt like coming home. But the globe itself was a black sphere, and on its black surface there was a dark reflection, who was me but not me, not this fat huge-eared friendly importer named Gerolamo, but some other shape which I forgot as soon as I saw it, like the shadow of a cat as a graveyard is alighted with storm, a white cat with teeth for eyes. And the orb grew and grew, or I shrunk and shrunk, and its arc opened and opened until, after infinite time, it was a straight line, and it was a flat surface. And it was the something that had been described in something I read long ago, in a book which, I think, was about the holistic destinies of the Galaxy: The front of the machine has a comforting translucent or reflective quality...”

The neighbor smiled generously: “Well, that dream was alright, wasn’t it? Although lacking in mystery and unclearness of meaning.” His chocolate had all been consumed while he heard the narration.

“True enough, my good fellow. Keep sending good wishes my way, even though I remain skeptical regarding their results.”

“Well, anything to avoid the bad stuff.” Blaqdepfs took a crumpled page, ripped from a notebook, and read: “The most common and distinct are called false awakenings. You dream of waking up but in fact, of course, are still asleep. Van Eeden (1913) called these ‘wrong waking up’ and described them as ‘demoniacal, uncanny, and very vivid and bright, with . . . a strong diabolical light.’ Absolute subsuming, no?”

“Sounds like every second of our lives, to be honest, old bunt.”

They laughed, and Gerolamo continued downstairs. Gerolamo thought about diabolical lights, and how schizophrenics often describe light as a menacing, hostile force.

-2b-

I seem to have been destined to be especially concerned with the vulture, for one of the first things I remember about my childhood is how a vulture came to me when I was still in the cradle, forced open my mouth with its tail, and struck me several times between the lips with it.

He greeted the twins who lived two levels below him, and were sitting on the floor, reading together a newspaper.

“Good morning, brothers Qele-Qele. Greetings to you, Biy, and to you, Bhy.” He took off his hat to both, in turn, and then sat beside them, panting heavily.

“Good morning, kind sir,” they chorused.

“And – happy birthday, am I wrong?”

“No, indeed, it’s our birthday,” said Biy.

“We’ll be having a small get-together in the late afternoon. If you’re around by that time…”

“Probably not, I’ll work until nightfall. Have you started the books I presented each of you? I apologize for the early gifting, but I believe in giving presents as soon as you acquire them. After all, a sudden, untimely death of mine should not be a bother and stay between my friends and the small, humble gifts I offer them.”

“I’m greatly enjoying mine. Such powerful thoughts as It will not allow us to escape our burdens because it wishes to make us stronger, for greater burdens. Being haunted by this demon is the situation of the “initiate”, the elect. Only inner warfare of this sort causes us to descend to the bottom of things and put away all easy answers, even “philosophy,” even “profundity.” Then, at the bottom of the pit that has no bottom, we may look the Tyrant in the eye and know who he is, who Destiny is, and what he wants of us. This does not make us “better” at all. It makes us twin brothers to necessity.”

“Yes, I imagined you’d prize the twin image. I thought of you when I read it myself.”

“Meanwhile I’m finding mine greatly instructive. Such handsome turns of phrase as Life delineates itself on the canvas called time; and time never repeats, once gone forever gone; and so is an act, once done, it is never undone. Life is a sumi-e painting, which must be executed once and for all time and without hesitation, without intellection, and no corrections are permissible or possible.”

“Yes, I imagined you’d prize the no-repetition thought. I pictured you when I read it myself.”

“We are fat, the three of us,” mentioned Bhi, gesturing with both hands, encompassing his interlocutor.

“But we value greatly you think of us both as individuals, not some kind of collective consciousness,” said his brother.

“In your culture, I’m told, of all pairs of twins one must be killed at birth.”

“Yes, but we would have no such thing.”

“We ate our way out of our native village.”

“Roamed the forests for years.”

“And were adopted by a family from a pyroman tribe.”

“Happy ending.”

“Isn’t it?”

“We think so.”

Gerolamo laughed. “Quite so! But only the beginning of another story, surely? Or am I but a footnote in the appendix of your life-stories?”

“Nonsense.”

“Many men can be in the text.”

“No honor there.”

“And footnotes are also unrealistically…”

“…full of themselves.”

“No, sir.”

“You are written in the page numbering.”

“Very clever.”

Gerolamo grinned and stood up. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but it sets me in a noble type. Garamond perhaps. I like it.”

“Have a good day, sir,” they chorused as he went down the final set of stairs.

“And you too, an excellent birthday,” he replied, not turning back.

-2c-

"Sir," Saint-Savin replied, "the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life. We should rather aspire to a heaven where only the planets live in eternal bliss, receiving neither rewards nor condemnations, but enjoying merely their own eternal motion in the arms of the void."

Gerolamo arrived at the ground floor and went to his mailbox. It contained some business proposals and a leaflet entitled The cultists in their folly.

Spongaronga Existential Consultancy Service!, it advertised. Seminars this month about the paradoxes of worshipping death.

It quoted:

Why the Female Ghoſts appear unto Ulyβes, before the Heroes and maſculine ſpirits? Why the Pſyche or ſoul of Tireſias is of the maſculine gender; who being blinde on earth ſees more then all the reſt in hell; Why the Funerall Suppers conſiſted of Egges, Beans, Smallage, and Lettuce, ſince the dead are made to eat Aſphodels about the Elyzian medows? Why ſince there is no Sacrifice acceptable, nor any propitiation for the Covenant of the grave; men fet up the Deity of Morta, and fruitleſly adored Divinities without ears? it cannot eſcape ſome doubt.

It quoted:

All day long to Mung cry out the Priests of Mung, and, yet Mung harkeneth not. What then, shall avail the prayers of All the People?

Rather bring gifts to the Priests, gifts to the Priests of Mung.

So shall they cry louder unto Mung than ever was their wont.

And it may be that Mung shall hear.

It quoted:

"Natheless between Pegana and the Earth flutter ten thousand thousand prayers that beat their wings against the face of Death, and never for one of them hath the hand of the Striker been stayed, nor yet have tarried the feet of the Relentless One.

It quoted:

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death

Horseman, pass by!

It concluded: Understand the exact nature of Death and its appeasement. Only 2,000 platinum doubloons inscription. No non-Kubrikean coinage accepted.

Gerolamo laughed and crumpled the leaflet. He sung to himself as he went out into the streets:

“And yet/ It missed the gist of the whole thing; it missed/ What mostly interests the preterist;/ For we die every day; oblivion thrives/ Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,/ And our best yesterdays are now foul piles/ Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files./ I’m ready to become a floweret/ Or a fat fly, but never, to forget.”

He walked down the final brick steps and a purple butterfly landed on his lapel. It sat there avoiding caterpillar dreams for a while and then flew off. Gerolamo stepped forth.

He joined the masses going about their business. He felt tired already, but very alive, and mumbled: “You heard that, Elaraia, you bitch?”

-3-

Perhaps that is the last illusion to die: the hope that something not totally imbecile exists somewhere, even if only in the indefinite, ever-potential tomorrow.

The medieval ecumenopolis sprawled like the brains of a suicide, Key-land proper within a ring of trenches full of sizzling green acid but otherwise hardly more urbanized than the outside. In these days before the dragons had imposed elegance the streets always had music and dancing as well as fog and rain. Copper-skinned men in white gowns drummed matchboxes for rhythm while one of their number swung around in fluid acrobatics. They looked like they had not a worry in life but accurately kept score against each’s own shadow. Holy men with their hair in long locks muttered permutations of God’s name while poking open a way with star-tipped silver canes. Occasionally they’d find a particularly interesting permutation and stop on their tracks, and then they’d open a grin, tears would flow down their bearded cheeks, and they’d hug and kiss people passing by, having discovered another facet of the all-lovingness of the All-Loving. Socially awkward young apprentices of great martial masters went about in small errands, sword in waist and headband drenched in sweat, secretly spoiling for a fight. Brown-cloaked monks went about giving benedictions and waving burning incense, purifying the city air with cardamom and jasmine, the corners of their mouths foaming with spit as they chanted hateful predictions of impending doom. Some men with heavy make-up, dressed in bright viridian pants and sleeveless purple shirts, carried long spikes with rotting corpses impaled along their length, announced with gold-ring-pierced mouths the service of one or another company of meddyén mercenaries. Buffoons in colorful and noisy garb jingled about in their deathly serious business, observing with the keen green eyes of fools the flaws and masks of common and uncommon men for future reference. A group of off-duty gladiators went about refusing autographs with dismissive humility, bare-chested and with their right arms wrapped in gold-metal manica and galera with servomotor support, the brows in their rocks-star faces almost unnoticeably raised in puzzlement at the unasked question of how can they be loved and wished dead so intensely at the same time – not for nothing the Arena had a statue of some forgotten goddess with the inscription “I kill a man on the day that his life is sweetest to him”, the gladiators had forgotten their name but called her “she who kisses then kills us”, and it was in her direction they saluted at the beginning of the games, not in the direction of a nonexistent sovereign – these gladiators walked past Gerolamo just as he passed a warlock standing on a soapbox, human skull and spine in his right hand, squares of rusty metal soldered into his forehead, preaching the warning: “we build our cloud cities already ruined! Their patios and cisterns with jade clepsydras wherein swim mirror-dragon tadpoles; the verandas and the libraries with rosewood desks, busts of Pallas, mould-transfigured tomes and hourglasses whose silicon dreams timelessly of invisible light; the balconies overlooking ball-courts abandoned but still painted with blood and peppered with broken teeth, and the smoking rooms with tiger-skin armchairs, ice chandeliers and, on small crystal tables, woodcut-painted boxes of grimy filth from bitter catarrh between teeth, aged over millions of years into a bituminous consistency; the gardens with the wailing peacocks and the fountains at which we lean to quench our thirst in water so frosted that tiny flakes float in it only to dissolve from our hands’ warmth like misremembered happiness upon waking, and we see under the surface throbbing anemones in shocking bright colors, yellow strongest of all, anemones smiling mouthlessly an alien, tear-clouded, loving smile at our eyes, and we realize the water is not translucent at all but reflective like quicksilver...”, to which considerations one of the gladiators thought silently “well, a pre-lapsarian world, it’s not really conceivable now is it?”. A rebel general with a black bandana and a belt of grenades around his black chest bought albino apples from a young boy with no limbs and tentacles instead of eyes. The rebel’s spinal curvature betrayed memories of some personal, fearful Maracanazo; the boy spoke bravely, dismissively of his own plight, that close encounter with a pack of gluttonous rats that reduced him to his present sessile state. The crowd thinned around a pair of knight-advocates marching from some demoniac court of justice, their crimson full-plate armor dented and scorched in several places, blood dripping down their scabbards, elegant armored suitcases in their right hands bearing centenary coats of arms of mighty judicial bloodlines, helmets removed and carried under the left arm, revealing piously selfish and delicately well-groomed yuppie faces personifying sophistic triumphalism and excellent taste in neckties – dongspider silk, no doubt. Grasshopper-men with metallic boomerangs prowled about, hunting some unseen quarry to be swiftly dismembered and eaten in plain sight (“whoever’s defenseless is fair game” being an ancient unofficial city motto). Gerolamo stopped to look the wares of a scaly goldsmith, who specialized in clockwork fish with intricate ecologic interrelations. He quickly walked by the furry furriers with their foreboding wares of mink, ekhasugde, marten-cicada, manticore and sable. By then he was already in Riviera Street and missionaries of the Order of St. Martim Codax stood sea-side downing copious amounts of Port perfumed with myrrh and eating hot dogs with sauerkraut while singing:

 

Waves that I came to see,

Ah waves, say unto me

Why my lover lingers thus

Away from me?

 

O waves that ebb and swell,

Will you not to me tell

Why my love tarries thus

Away from me?

 

These missionaries never preached or proselytized, for theirs was the difficultly subjective job of exomologetes and thus they led by example of heartache. Further down the street filthy university students ran amok in a typical nihilistic orgy of destruction and Gerolamo had to shoot a pair of them to get by unharmed. The others laughed and ate honeycombs and drew mournful dissonances from cellos while one declaimed:

“Said a Master once: Thus we see ceaselessly accomplished, from the gnat to the human, the great law of the violent destruction of living beings. The entire earth, continually imbibed with blood, is nothing but an immense altar where all that lives must be immolated without end, without measure, without let-up, right up to the consummation of all things, right up to the extinction of evil, right up to the death of death.”

Upon which they all burst into a favored drinking song from time immemorial:

But the worm shall revive thee with kisses;

Thou shalt change and transmute as a god,

As the rod to a serpent that hisses,

As the serpent again to a rod.

Thy life shall not cease though thou doff it;

Thou shalt live until evil be slain,

And good shall die first, said thy prophet,

Our Lady of Pain.

Gerolamo pushed onwards through the thick crowd, feeling now very hungry.

-4-

Every man who begets a free act projects his personality into the infinite. If he gives a poor man a penny grudgingly, that penny pierces the poor man’s hand, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes in suns, crosses the firmament and compromises the universe.

Gerolamo stopped at Teknoë’s edibles stand and ordered the first course of his morning’s massive meal. Teknoë threw on the white-hot stone the sliced uycumats, the bacon and the groaye eggs. All stirred and placed in a lightly toasted lowvi bun. Served with ngafdha licorice diluted in ground ice. A street philosopher pulled Gerolamo’s lapel.

“My friend, I’m Professor Grigrengro Grangru. May I interest you in a lecture about freedom?”

“Social or existential?” asked Gerolamo indulgently.

“Existential, mostly,” the philosopher replied.

“Alright, show me what you’ve got.” Gerolamo pulled a quarter-doubloon from his pocket and tossed it to the philosopher, who took it gracefully and stored it beneath his coarse brown beret.

He spoke: “It’s like a magician’s trick, defiance. It’s difficult to watch defiance in strangers. We will at some point desire, secretly or not, to see it crushed under boot. We will, if we’re dignified spirits, hope to see its downfall. Just like we want to know how a magician does his thing at the expense of the world. Even knowing that when defiance is crushed or the trick exposed, we will not be satisfied. This phenomenon, I believe, is ultimately about uncertainty. As long as it’s possible to defy that which we’re subservient to, or as long as it’s possible that reality be not quite what we understand it to be, we can’t rest. Perhaps we can be at peace with never being able to capture ultimate truths, but only if no-one else is able either. But that life will never allow rest, because every new rebel, every new magician will have to be unmasked and renormalized. Perhaps that’s the theological fearfulness of Lucifer, the one defined by defiance, the rebel whose will cannot be crushed. (On the other hand, it’s a stalemate: his will is only profound insofar as rebellion is truly hopeless. Nothing is as anticlimactic as Lucifer free.) As long as he exists, we must live with the suspicion things could, and perhaps should, be different, a huge trial of faith. That makes loving our lives harder. It’s the fearfulness opposite of eighty-four, where we can’t even trust ourselves to rebel, and we may be forced to love a terrible life. Well, then, what’s the solution, the escape from this? I’m still thinking about it, and doubt I’ll ever find complete peace. Will, the heart of consciousness, may be defined by this rebellion, and this repulsion I speak of may be the universe’s hostility to Will. Perhaps. There is a war that is us, a war between our absolute subjectivities and an alleged reality. Cogito, ergo yet… I don’t know. Frye wrote that the “ergo” is the crucial word there, for the sentence begs acceptance of the strength and reality of the therefores (must we hold such faith?). We fear being puppets, and we fear being shown we have been puppets all along, the shame of being told we allowed ourselves to be fooled. If it were just a matter of being afraid of freedom… but no, it’s about being afraid of being unable to recognize freedom and its opposite. We may come to want the certainty of complete imprisonment or complete freedom, but certainty is not possible, not for us, only for abstractions. I guess we’ll have to live with the uncertainty, or transcend our present concepts. I personally think (during the brief moments I feel particularly enlightened) there is no freedom and no prison, only the daydreams of freedom and of prison. And like all imagination-birds, they can be twisted in the cages of obsession, or allowed to fly as ornaments in the garden of the philosophers. But that, coming around, is a metaphor of freedom and imprisonment.”

By then Gerolamo had finished the first course. He clapped, and some people nearby also gave small change to the philosopher, who bowed with a thankful grin.

“Well,” said Gerolamo. “On domination, from an unusual perspective.”

“Thank you. I’m working on a new lecture for next week. It will be the beginning of a cycle about Diogenes of Sinope and Taoism. From the teachings of Pyrrhon of Elis and Baglao the Shaslop, I’ll explore my concept of ‘acatalepsy of alterity’, that is, the incomprehensibleness, the impossibility of conceiving others, you know, other people, of really putting oneself in their place. There is an Anaxerretibean school that uses the concept of Gibborim as the mental, virtual images we have of other people. We never really know other people, we just collect our experiences of them and attribute them to a Gibborah, and hope it corresponds as much as possible to the real thing. When we hate or love wrongly, we do so because the Gibborah corresponds little with the real person – although Freud will say love is, by definition, the overestimation of an object. You’ve heard of Hell Bank Notes? These are afterlife monetary offerings, burned so ancestors may have cash in the lands of the dead. I propose we start questioning the analogous way in which we spend ourselves to appease other people, who live in a separate world altogether from ours: the benighted world of stuff that aren’t me. Hell Bank Notes are hilarious for us because of the clear category mistake, as Ryle would put it. We find childish a concept of the afterlife that is so similar to life that it also includes – and requires – vile money. We should also question: why should the world of medium-neutral information include, and include nothing but, corresponding events to any social-microcosmic incidents. It’s been said we live in a description, not a place. I agree. It’s more effective to directly improve the description than the place. It’s also been said myth redeems history. I also agree. While we’ll all be, to some extent, trod upon by the goose-stepping combat boots of history, we should remember the relationship between world-history and kerygma-history: the first tells us what we would have seen had we been there; the second tells us the profounder truths the things we would have seen had we been there could have distracted us from. The immediate conclusion is a suspension of judgment, like in Sextus Empiricus, avoiding unfounded belief in a syzygy between ourselves, a Gibborah and the flesh failure it corresponds to.”

“And death, tell us about death,” said a yellow bird guy nearby. Having finished breakfast, he sharpened a razor with his beak: he was a traveling barber.

“Many think death is sad because of experience forever lost. They believe in oblivion, in loss, in the flow of time leaving the past behind. I often had those dreams that are more fascinating and fulfilling than the whole of my existence could possibly hope to ever be. I told myself as they slipped away: Let it go, don't try to remember it, it was the present once, it will be again after infinite changes, wait, wait... Time may be cyclical or illusory. Or if it isn’t, which is more likely, you may still pretend to yourself with strength, with faith, that nothing is lost, that everything is in a timeless pattern, and wait for when before comes around next, because waiting forever is still better than loss – especially if there is no forever, and you wait and you die and then there is no more waiting, or maybe it should be said, then the waiting is peaceful and forever, after the fashion of rocks drifting in emptiness.”

“Brilliant. Have another coin to subsidize your meditations.” Teknoë then poured Gerolamo a bowlful of the classic gahmu broth, made of ekhasugde ‘egg’ boiled in water until melting into a thick soup, with sliced kolad soup and aromatic herbs, such as ground silver oak leaves. Gerolamo ate alternating sips of the broth with bites off a block of processed nictitating membranes, a sakafrojan delicacy imported through his own business.

That course dealt with, Gerolamo got from a passing paperboy that morning’s The Daily Bamf. The street philosopher had left a few hundred kilocalories earlier. He read the news. The Bamf’s main defect was a proneness to indulging in the primitive glee of ennumeration, and perhaps it catered a bit too radically to the culture of subtlety and epigram-speak then fashionable; but few other newssources were as reliable, and none other was within the reach of his hands at that moment, which certainly counted for much.

“Oh,” he told Teknoë, “the industrial-grade SLIME market is booming.”

“The what now market who?”

“Subsurface Lithotrophic Microbial Ecosystem. Rock-eating germs. Many uses, especially in cosmetics and warfare.”

“Ah.”

“I have invested greatly in the produce of ten years from now. There will be a high in prices because of this news. Maybe I should realize my gains and reinvest elsewhere?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t! Maybe the gods will smite all speculators.”

“I’ll have nothing to do with mirrors,” Gerolamo laughed. “Yes, I think I’ll do that. All other news seem to be about Strategos Kochl’s triumph. Well, giving the repdolo his due, he did quite well against the dragons.”

“When the levee breaks…”

“Yes, Teknoë?”

“It’s a song. I was thinking of what will happen when the tigers break free. Or, in our case, the dragons.”

“What do you think will happen, pray tell?”

Teknoë laughed, threw some onions, fresh carru bone-marrow and oza falcon down on the frying pan, and sang: “Where have all the people gone my honey, where have all the people gone today? There's no need for you to be worrying about all those people my honey, you never see those people anyway.”

“My thoughts on this matter are not entirely dissimilar, my good man; things will happen, some bad, some good, and there will be day and night; sometimes we’ll be happy, others we’ll be miserable; there will be surprises and also things we expected. In the end, there will be no ground for poisoned weepings, although inevitably there will be some.”

“And you’ll profit?”

“From the weepings?”

“No, in general.”

“Yes, I hope so. Even dragons can be made to suckle the gentle, soft manboobs of Mammon.”

-5-

[Chesterton] once said that a sword was the most glorious object in the world, but that a pocketknife was more glorious than a sword, because it was a secret sword.

Gerolamo arrived at Gerolamo & Shadows Warehouse mid-storm. Lightning cracked and nuclear flames poured down on the protective medicine-shells over the city; the water however rained down mightily past these defenses; the passers-by waded in ankle-high wetness. Gerolamo pressed the button to the left of the copper door and called out, “Pepe! I’ve pressed the button!”

The door opened and Gerolamo went in. He found the Cervical Completeness Crew working with their monocles and tiny light-scalpels on their tiny clockwork marvels. He addressed one of them, Fócoc, to no response. He likes to keep his mortal engine clean, it’s a clean machine, Gerolamo thought. He poked the man in the side of his stomach with the mud-caked tip of his umbrella, but Fócoc continued working paying him no mind. Only when Gerolamo poked him again, this time in the cheekbone, did Fócoc turn.

“Oh, I hadn’t noticed. Good day, good sir.”

“Well, well. What are you working on in this fine-weathered morn?”

“I’m making a toy. A small automaton of a Roman hit-man named Kanat Kardybekov. He fights with knives, but he can also disintegrate people with his brain. On his right forearm he has a tattoo stating pacta sunt servanda. On his left, the defensive formula rebus sic stantibus. A classic.”

“Flavor of manly. Did such a person ever exist?”

Fócoc’s eyes glazed over. He pointed to the wall, with a torn-out page from a book stuck with a red-metal ritual dagger. Gerolamo walked to it. There was a bit underlined with red ink: “There is no story that is not true,” said Uchendu. “The world has no end…”

“Aha,” said Gerolamo. “You were a cleric once, weren’t you? Of the Detovermis?”

Fócoc shrugged. “I died once. Frost giant skeleton in magic full plate once. Guts thrashed spilling in the warm sand, once. Anyway, Çernobét is the one who put that in there.”

Gerolamo nodded. “Carry on then.”

“I will, by fuck, and how.” The employee whistled, and a robot wheeled to him on two and a half wheels. It was a mobile espresso machine. He drew black deliciousness from within. It came out steaming and folding space-time around itself. And that’s how the Cervical Completeness Crew always completes its undertakings in time.

Gerolamo passed the obsidian-python-girded doorway to his office. Çernobét, his secretary, greeted him.

“Hail o excellent boss. Some beings are being in the waiting room in wait of you to peddle their peddling.”

“Great, send them in, serially preferably. Take my umbrella and coat as a preceding procedure.”

“Certainly, I assert.”

Gerolamo sat on his dragon leather armchair and took a small box from the first drawer of his squishytech druidesk. The wood recognized its master and did not stab him with poisonous thorns, as it would have done to an unauthorized intruder. He opened the small box. A tiny man was inside, and held up for Gerolamo a toothpick.

“How are you today, Martin?”

“Fine enough, sir,” said the little man a bit sadly, “but I still haven’t been able to contemplate nothingness to my satisfaction.”

“Well, it’s a tricky thing, nothingness.”

“Yes, sir. I’m trying to work from Parmenides and Zen, but I just can’t seem to be able to grasp it with my mind.”

“Well, it is said that there are three stages to contemplation – seeing, observing and revering. Perhaps you’re attempting a purely intellectual understanding of nothingness when it’s a concept completely elusive except to the most intricate, intuitive mystical insight.”

“I dreamt of a lovely girl I loved. She was blond, young and named Spate. I was getting on her nerves by the end.”

“That’s what irrupts into our dreams of nothingness, yes. Desire, which can’t be coerced, for affirmation. Tragic. Even horrible. He met the Nightmare and her nine-fold.”

“As said in holy scripture, they walk serene and unsuspected, not in the spaces we know, but between them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, ‘Erscheinung’ refers to the world as it presents itself to us. But since the world is generally not to be considered a conscious agent, we should take it to mean the way we present the world to ourselves, because of our senses and neurologies and genes, coupled with our memetic software. It all gives a nasty spin to Goethe’s description of the twilight phenomenon as alles Nahe werde fern – all that is close becomes distant. Because there is a component of not wanting to perceive what we do not perceive.”

“And vice-versa. I see. They are like fnords.”

“And when the levee breaks, we can see the fnords, despite our effort to control our waking world.”

“And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful. But I ask you, Martin, what is worse: a world where 2+2=5 can be made to be true via reality editing, via doublethink, or a world where nature cracks down on us, like the karma police, but at least you know truth will win through eventually?”

“Mundus vult decipi. We usually desire the first type of world. Because it’s the type of world in which our desires matter. In the other one, however, faith is possible. I do not know which is worse.”

“You know how it goes. Total subjectivists would claim Reality is conspiracy to imprison Imagination and Will. Stupid consensual Reality.”

“And we know the flaw of that teenage line of reasoning – because we know, aesthetically, that Acceptance is beautiful and good.”

“Not to mention Nature cracks down on us. The blind nuclear idiot god at the center of creation. The cthulhoi who walk serene and unsuspected.”

“Yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Yes.”

“And that is why life is failure.”

Martin looked away wistfully. “In my world, we fasted all night, and watched sunrise with our friends and loved ones. We took the remaining cold coffee we had used to stay up all night and dropped red hot coals into it. The scent of hot coffee rose up with the sun, and we knew it would be a beautiful day. We then went to bed and slept almost until nightfall, because we felt we didn’t need to live beautiful days, it was enough that they existed. And thus we were a people of faith, and not of desire, because we believed the day and the beloved girl would have been there even if we never experienced them.”

“Is that solace, balm?”

“Just take the fucking toothpick, my arms hurt.”

Gerolamo took the toothpick and put the box away. From another drawer he took a can of guaraná soda. Twisting a tab, its temperature dropped to a near freeze. He took a long, painful draft. Then he placed the toothpick between his teeth, clenched them a little, and felt ready for anything.

“Windowbird,” he addressed a tiny automaton perched on a sexy bust of Athe, “have the first business person sent in for business discussion.”

The machine was an original product of the Cervical Completeness Crew. It was made of billions of tiny windows, each opening into a different world. It was possible to see anywhere, perhaps. It was brand named Aleph Canary. Gerolamo used it for small errands.

“I wish it were a toucan,” Gerolamo thought to himself. “Like in the old wise saying that ‘when a toucan crosses your path in the way to sort-of-work, you will remember that for years’.”

-6a-

In those vast helmets and human faces and pieces of armour, among which, in great letters, the motto Infelix Sum is woven in and out, it is perhaps not fanciful to see the fruit of a wistful after-dreaming…

The person coming in was short for a male, but powerfully built and wearing a gray cloak and metal mask.

“Greetings to the Arsenal,” said Gerolamo.

The creature nodded in acknowledgement. “You have dealt business with the Arsenal before. Our history of transactions is in fact very satisfactory.”

“Right. Your type is called cenobite, right?”

“No. Cenobites are those who live communal lives and produce the weapons. Anchorites are the independent wandering ones who perform the transactions.”

“Alright. What do you have to offer, anchorite?”

“The usual variety, of course. Spears, swords, shields… scythes for the exotic-minded, bows and arrows, crossbows and bolts, catapults and greek fire… the best part of a big sale is when the crates are being opened, with the soldiers checking the balance of their new best friends, the steel and eyes mirroring one another, the silent awe before our craftsmanship… one counts one’s payment through a mist of joyous tears… a satisfied customer is everything.”

Gerolamo nodded distractedly, passing the toothpick from one side to another of his mouth. “Business has been good, I’d imagine?”

“Business is always good for us.”

“Whoever said ‘arms dealers are going to inherit the Earth’? Anyway. Leave with my secretary this week’s catalogue.”

“You still do legitimate business, of course? The Arsenal is watching your dragon problems and wishes to keep businesslike impartiality in these affairs.”

“Legitimate? There aren’t laws in this city, anchorite. We don’t believe in laws, only in being concerned only with deep existential questions and carrying big guns. The latter being why you are so particularly welcome.”

The anchorite nodded. “The Arsenal approves of anarchy. It’s good for business. Especially our business.”

“Any item of note in the most readily available shipment?”

“Ah, you should see for yourself. We have a blimp in airdock #23. The Hospitallers will be forewarned to allow you to perform a full inspection.” The anchorite looked upwards piously. “I’d mention the Ziz-92 self-propelled ballista projectile with Orcus-class imp guidance and a variable yield warhead containing clusters of grey clay beads of 2-centimeter diameter, each enchanted with an empowered CL-9 fireball spell. A one-meter, twelve row “clockface” warhead can deal annihilation of exactly eight point one kilo-d6 of damage in a very controlled, six meter radius zone.”

“Priced at…?”

“Ah, even a child could afford with the contents of his piggy bank.”

“I see.”

“The guidance system is specifically designed for use against airborne targets. A nanotech clay table contains a citation of Obadiah 1:4 – Though thou shalt exalt thyself as the eagle, and though thou shalt set thy nest among the stars, thence will I bring thee down. But of course, it can be manually retrofitted for other purposes.”

“Dragonslaying?”

“The Arsenal does not support either side.”

“Not even in the event of imbalance? Surely uncertainty is bad for business? What if checks bounce?”

“Imbalance is part of the natural order. Either it evens out in the long run or it doesn’t matter.”

“Some would seek freedom from the natural order.”

“There is no need to struggle to be free. The absence of struggle is in itself freedom. My memory sadly fails re the source.”

“An attractive philosophy in a creditor, I must say,” said Gerolamo, laughing. “Has your race no interest in safety?”

“We have no time for illusions. It is said in sacred scripture:

There is no safety in the threefold world;

it is like a burning house,

replete with a multitude of sufferings,

truly to be feared,

constantly beset with the griefs and pains

of birth, old age, sickness and death,

which are like fires

raging fiercely without cease.

The Thus Come One has already left

the burning house of the threefold world

and dwells in tranquil quietude

in the safety of forest and plain.”

“Bah, the problem with the world is that too many people give in to their inner assholes,” said Gerolamo dismissively. “You make a point in increasing the amount of griefs and pains around, too.”

“A very unfair passing of judgment. We merely provide the means, and others’ desires then manifest themselves.”

“Supply and demand. Of course, you’re right. How very hypocritical of me to judge.”

“The Arsenal believes in the sincerity produced by the cleansing fires of conflict. It helps us give up on this world and our selves, and embrace dissolution into nirvana. As Retsuzan put it, The night I understood/ this is a world of dew,/ I woke up from my sleep. Such awakening can only happen at night, because sunlight is blinding.”

“A creed as good as any other. Well, I’m afraid your time is up, but be sure to leave the catalogue. We’ll definitely conduct some transactions. I’ll also visit the airdocks if I have the time.”

“Very well. The Arsenal is ever pleased to conduct business with you.”

The anchorite left. Gerolamo took some notes and had Windowbird summon in whoever was next.

-6b-

But the Elvish weakness was in these terms naturally to regret the past, and to become unwilling to face change: as if man were to hate a very long book still going on, and wished to settle down in a favourite chapter.

It was an elf pirate with a blue mane and baroque court clothes. “Ah, at last I am admitted into the holiest where the magic happens,” said the pirate looking around.

Gerolamo, “Welcome, oh Valendil, swashbuckler, arcanist, rapist and man of letters extraordinaire. Sorry for the delay.”

“Yes, yes, all in a man’s day. It wasn’t so bad to sit in your stone garden waiting for the rain to stop. Not as good as hanging out with Saharan Sufis at a shisha bar in Dongola, I guess. What is this?” He examined a draping curtain. “Trans-velvet?”

“Sort of. But no.”

“It feels good holding it.”

“Yes, yes indeed. That’s why it’s there.”

“Mmm.”

There was a long silence.

“A complete copy of (the observable part of) our universe should exist about 10 to the power 10^118 meters away,” said Gerolamo. “Some cosmologists say, that is. Ever been there?”

“Yes. Unimpressive place. The same as here.”

“Well, I would think…”

“I’m liquidating assets around town you know. The dragons are rolling, rolling, rolling. I have stuff to sell. And stuff to buy. And then I’m off – there are galaxies to terrorize in beautiful cruelty and the thrill of polysyllables and theology. Privatio boni and all. It’s not Good’s fault if I’m ready to take you away, take you away.”

Gerolamo grinned. He stood up and held an end of the curtain himself. “Draconomics: an imperial power will have inflation because of the influx of tribute, loot and colonial wealth. This will lead to trade imbalance and the weakening of the internal private enterprise, especially the industrial types. Unless the State hoards most of this tribute in the form of a huge pile of gold to sleep upon. Are you intoxicated, pirate?”

“And how. This is so sad! Your city is going to shit. I mean, it will probably all be alright in a few millennia, but still, in your lifespan. I can see the tragedy, despite having untold millennia to harbor boredom. It moves me, you know. What happens to you. And thus am I, thus. He sips an amaranth wine, as they say.”

“Now now, the city’s been worse off. We have swords and chariots and madmen with swords on chariots. We’re no strangers to what comes, ‘whin it comes tae the law ay the dragon.’ Like a mother might say, ‘just be good and brave and secretive’.”

“They had gone unto the wars,/ Trusting to the mild-eyed stars,/ Nightly, from their azure towers,/ To keep watch above the flowers…”

Gerolamo walked back to his desk, took a notebook from a drawer. “The ideal lover of flowers is he who visits them in their native haunts, like Taoyuenming, who sat before a broken bamboo fence to converse with the wild chrysanthemum, or Linwosing, losing himself amid mysterious fragrance as he wandered in the twilight among the plum-blossoms of the Western Lake. ‘Tis said that Chowmushih slept in a boat so that his dreams might mingle with those of the lotus. It was the same spirit which moved the Empress Komio, one of our most renowned Nara sovereigns, as she sang: ‘If I pluck thee, my hand will defile thee, O Flower! Standing in the meadows as thou art, I offer thee to the Buddhas of the past, of the present, of the future.’ ”

“Yes. Exactly. I’m doing exactly that right here. That. Here.”

“Keep telling yourself that.”

Valendil lowered his face and moaned, “But by grace of ‘Having my blood smeared on the war drums’! This is pleasant velvet to touch. It reminds me of a prince’s wife I will caress some time in the future.”

“What’ve you got to sell?”

“There are fungi. Fungi that control your mind, and make you climb the highest pinnacles so when you burst into a spore bloom all that fractal fungality is spread over a greater area. And then fungi that spread through books, and make you climb the highest pinnacles of literary achievement so your work will spread their genes across the ages, spores of ideas that eat from without, enslave and consume. And then fungi that spread across the planes of loveliness, and make you climb the highest pinnacles of love, such love as is not possible for people who love other people but rather people who love beings above, heights reserved for avian preciousnesses and eyeballs overtaken with fungus, unto chimerical reality-editing that facilitates being overtaken by the fungi, that hop from character to reader and occasionally back. All of them. I have. In glasses. In boxes. In crates. With labels.”

“Superb,” said Gerolamo. “I’ll buy everything. What do you want?”

“I don’t remember! I worry it was some McGuffin that would have fixed the entire plot of everything. For the simplicity of the world is much too complex for the machinery of... eh?... yeah. I saw ‘an old man sticking his head in the water off the dock’, I forgot what I was here for. I am too handsome to remember futile things like this plot I’m in. Was it a man named Max who set me on this forgotten errand? ‘I wanted to throttle a swan’…”

“Most of the ships we set forth with gifts for distant kings enrich the sea-bottom, but the gold is no less precious in the miry depth. ‘Maybe it’s the fountain of water so delicious...’ ”

Valendil let go of the curtain. “No, that’s a common mistake. Most of the ships I seize. I am a seizer of ships, and stars. ‘…they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.’ ” Valendil opened his hands and the illusion of a puppet show was upon them. “Maybe this will aid me to remember.”

FIRST PUPPET: “Well, Moebius, what happens now?”

OTHER ONE: “It’s back to plan A, I guess, my dear Moebius.”

FP: “Plan A? We had that?”

OO: “The Rocket, erasing everything forever, etc.”

FP: “Oh, right, that. Duh.”

OO: “I know, I know, it’s hard to keep track.”

Valendil sighed and closed his hands.

Gerolamo asked, “Brave captain, are you afraid?”

Valendil snapped his fingers. “That’s it. I remember. I need you to set up a Trust. A song will be needed one day at a certain place.”

“To quote the Chu Ci, Dark patterns in a hidden place/ The ill of sight call a formless nothing. I do not comprehend, as you imagine.”

“Do I either? After making Zhou Yu, did the heavens still their brush? I’m here for Ismaili alvíssaras, my friend. I feel quite cheated by whoever gave me this assignment.” Valendil magic’d into being a roll of inscribed silk in a wax-sealed jade tube with detailed instructions.

“It shall be done,” said Gerolamo, taking the tube and storing it in his desk. “All we know is that ‘When the sun is warm on Indigo Field a smoke issues from jade’, and dragon tears turn into jellybeans eh.”

“I must leave dynamically. Time is short for everything one must accomplish if one is Valendil!”

There was scorching, and some smell of ozone, and colors.

-7-

Those who wear light warm garments, furs and patterned silks, who live in heated rooms and ride in comfortable carriages, do not comprehend the danger and cold of those who must mount the border defenses to gaze across the barbarian wastes or face into the icy wind...

After Gerolamo had done paperwork for two hours, there was rolling thunder and brief distant screaming. He went outside, finding the workshop deserted. He stepped outside, ashes snowed on his lapel, nobody else in the streets. In the sky, the zeppelins of Strategos Kochl’s college huscarls sank in slow green expirations. In the beautiful chiaroscuro shapes of the velvet-smoke clouds, a hint of claw here, a scaly tail there. So many souls were departing that they formed a luminous pillar of light gently ascending with a weak screech. Gerolamo sat on the sidewalk, his boots in the coursing red stream, tiny waves with tiny frolicking serpents of the blue lightning novae above. Something chicken-shaped hopped beside him and shook its wings meaninglessly, then looked up following his gaze. Gerolamo patted the creature’s head, mumbling soft, comforting things. Things had changed.

 

 

The Ordalia of the Dragomirov Ergodic Orchestra: A New Kind of Stuff

-1-

Angels by Russell Edson

They have little use. They are best as objects of torment.

No government cares what you do with them.

Socadillo “the Doom-Bird” Mosahn lived his first decade of life at his native tribe, deep in the bamboo forests at Odila Quaternary, the planet gifted to the Qliui race by Emperor Wawrzïlèczsninnischzzalaar Gauss, the Architect-of-Futures. The season was such that some youths were selected to be liys, Socadillo one of their number. Meanwhile, across the Empire, alarm of civil war was storming, loudly in some regions, unnoticeably in others. For this was also a time when recently-crowned Emperor Werther Gauss warred for a consort.

Then see one morning Socadillo perched on a tall branch, strumming myriad resonances from his practice sitar. His fingers are bleeding, but he’s chewing breath-freshening ngafdha leaves, and now and then he wets his fingertips with saliva, to ease the pain. He’s watching his favorite mother consecrating the grayish bamboo and lsowwa cakes for the sodality’s party planned for that night, kneeling on a brazilwood shrine-platform, waving a holy sakaki branch with streamers of white paper-mulberry bark fiber, decked out in a ceremonial chain mail of bamboo disks. The air is cold and Socadillo’s neck feathers, all beautifully amber-colored, are puffed out. His hands shake a little making the music all the more perfectly imperfect. The night’s rain has left the leaves all around aglisten with quasi-diamond ephemera, and thus he hums a song he’s learned about Zarrothustra.

(The song tells how the Prophet found a wizard called Sochoklak who trapped the passers-by with the illusion of diamonds, and then changed them into man-sized flies. He then pulled out their wings. The man-sized flies formed disciplined chain-gangs of accountants and were hired as taskforces by major corporations – very major ones, they were still around to the last days. These accountants never felt any less alive for never having flown. Zarrothustra told Sochoklak of the hats with cords, not ribbons, and the wizard retired and became a fisherman. A true story.)

And then on a platform to his left the main lift’s creaking mechanism begins its own song. Soon arrives an imperial deputy, in military garb, all epaulets and gold chevrons and a crane feather fan. He is accompanied by some of the tribe’s most influential males. Socadillo holds a note. The man clears his throat and shouts out to the community, spread as it is in daily chores over the trees all around.

“Greetings, people of… local people. I come here to conscript your brave youth for even braver deeds in the battlefields whereupon our Emperor stamps the laughable rebels underfoot. We shall form a regiment of chasseurs, yea, finding folks and shooting them, a noble military calling. I brought guns and the other paraphernalia. All you have to do is provide full acritical compliance. Why does my nose bleed?”

Socadillo’s favorite mother glares at him. “Let it go, Soca.” He stops holding the note. A silence fall over the treetop community. Then a toucan flies noisily, with all the colors of a portent, in a swoop stealing one of the consecrated cakes. No-one minds, but Socadillo. He keeps his keen eyes on the toucan until it’s impossible to follow him anymore. But he feels he’s looking through the forest. Hunter’s sight, that common talent among his people? He feels a strong pressure at his temples and at the base of his neck, and then everything that is the universe becomes a toucan, except the toucan, in whose space the universe is compressed. He feels a mighty weariness, an encroaching faint, and is not able to choose to resist it. He’s out long before the instrument slips from his hands.

-2-

But if you were to hide the world in the world, so that nothing could get away, this would be the final reality of the constancy of things.

He’d speak often of that moment as one of the major turning points in his fate. A brutal war followed, and at the time of his castration, a conveniently timed explosion saved his physical integrity. He managed to conceal this fact, however, pretending the conducting male had been killed after the ritual was complete. This pretense was maintained at great difficulty, lessened with the help of the music he was mastering, using the secret techniques of the liys that were being revealed, almost for the first time, to a qliui still capable of reproduction. The combination of overwhelming forces could twist the true nature of the metaphysical typoi, but all parties involved remained unaware.

The war had waited for Soca. Musician training complete, he enlisted. The chasseurs were used as combined arms support for other units in the Odilan Theater. Soca was embedded in the 104^th Zacanid Regiment, probing the enemy front for sectors to breach. Soca made many friends in the veteran force of Stealth Marauders, teaching them specificities of stealth and wilderness survival in his native planet. That force had the often ungrateful task of assassinating the enemy’s arcane power support, and Soca’s marksmanship was of great use. Their morale was boosted by his music, and thus they received several unit commendations for collective valor.

In one particularly bitter battle, fought against Wendauerian mercenaries, Soca was trapped behind enemy lines, the treetops set ablaze in unexpected tactical cunning. On the ground, he rallied his friends with songs that made the Wendaurians blind and deaf, but even so they were being overwhelmed, and he had to fight in the brutal melee. They were rescued by the regiment’s elite, the Fencers, spearheaded by the regimental commander, Demon-Boyar Martechai Siik, who sliced through the berserking mercs cleaving himself a gory roadway with his massive thyberium poleaxe. The rescue was not in time to prevent Soca’s grievous injury, which cost him his right eye and caused permanent brain damage, destroying the parts of his brain responsible for empathy and moral behavior.

During the war, this was not noticed.

As liys, Soca didn’t really need his eyes to be a sniper, being finely attuned to all sorts of ethereal vibrations. Thus, he was reassigned as soon as his heath permitted, embedded in the 3^rd Kauin Regiment, making a powerful drive towards the heart of the enemy forces, collapsing their defenses all around as they tried to redeploy to defend their supply trains.

The 3KR was one of Werther Gauss’s best units, as attested by how it suffered no casualties during the whole campaign, except those in the auxilia. Soca met there and fell in love with one of the most remarkable characters in his biography. At the time she was disguised as Master Gardener Kukilien, but as Soca later learned she was Lady Iruike Kla-Rekein, daughter of the president-for-life of all Kauin (who are fairly immortal, to be quite honest).

It’s generally hypothesized that she was the hormonal trigger, together with his damaged brain, to release the music bound within Socadillo. The rebels had invested much in the Odilan Theater, and he now erased them from reality effortlessly. With simple chords, he shot down spacecraft carriers from the sky. The Emperor himself took interest, and used him to defeat the main forces of Grishkin Ticine. She was forced to concede defeat and surrender herself to marriage.

Records of this time are military secrets, and thus any biographer of the Doom-Bird is left with speculation and unanswerable questions. I believe he must have consummated his love at least once, for that explains better than any other theory how his music was unleashed. But on what terms did he part from his love? I believe she must have taken the initiative to leave, because his psychopathic tendencies greatly worsened thereafter. I guess she did thusly because she saw the gift he had and how it would break him. This theory has its failings, however, because we’ll see he wasn’t broken. Not until much later.

-3-

Restless, he dreamed of his shipwreck, and dreamed it as a man of wit, who even in dreams, or especially in them, must take care that as propositions embellish a conception, so reservations make it vital, while mysterious connections give it density; considerations make it profound; emphases uplift, allusions dissimulate, transmutations make subtle.

Peacetime had come at last and Soca had become used to the cosmopolitan life his special status offered. Instead of settling back among his people, he chose the metropolises of the galaxy, and a suitably pop occupation. He played two seasons as a winger for Rangers of Kubrik, and then transferred to Real Megiddo, completing one of the club’s golden generations, together with Skipper Legbrakka, El Hombre De La Cocaina, and striker The Fairy. His deadly runs down the left, nearly impossible to contain, were the origin of his epithet “the Doom-Bird” (aside from the obvious racial reference).

And thus were the doors of galactic high society open to Soca, who smoked dried flain tinder and laughed birdsong in a way ladies found most seductive. This was a time of many romantic conquests for him.

There was a philosopher he found in a picnic reading a book named Summer and the Desert. And he sat beside her and read aloud: “If you are unable to act at the perilous conjunction of contradictory forces, the moral and the poetic, then withdraw. Water the cabbages in your garden, and grow roses only in the cemetery. For roses are fatal to the soul.”

“What do you think of that?”

“We use roses in the wake, in the funeral and thereafter in the graveyard. Do we wish to kill the soul for sure, after the body is dead, so there will be no continuity, no remembrance?”

And thus he conquered her.

There was a writer, who was very vain, and told the people around her in a book-signing tour: “My best works, of course, are the Gieef Lives trilogy. The common thread is repetitive iteration of the dash punk phenomenon-pattern. The samurai Obuzo Ozubo is perhaps the first satoripunk anti-hero in literature: the ‘technology’ of mystical awakening, especially as originated from momentary epiphany, being used to revolutionize a social paradigm and topple an unjust elite, in a celebration of the individualistic use of new power. The alternative storyline continues into the tale of Kurtz R., my nazipunk anti-hero. It draws from my hypothetical wondering re what world could exist wherein Nazism could be a correct Weltanschauung. So in Kurtz’s world, Jewish usurers are the architects of all misery, his race is superior and the Fuhrer is infallible. From such knowledge he draws power, like the power gained by cyberpunks from their robotic implants, and his underground campaign of terror becomes justified, ultimately benign subversion aiming at an ultimate utopia of freedom for the overmen, and peaceful extinction for the undermen. By such crazy fiction, of course, we can learn much about our world. Lastly, in what I swear is no acknowledgement of Heinlein, the cycle ends with Dr. Faars and his quantumpunk revolution of godly eggheads…”

Soca leaned next to her ear and spoke softly: “I know what you spoke of when you used, as epigraph, gathering together the broken fragments of what had once been light…”

And thus he conquered her.

There was the eco-partisan who sung softly while gathering flowers in Sylphs’ Park:

“And I serve the fairy queen,

To dew her orbs upon the green...”

All he had to do was to perch on a tree and sing, of paradise that he was, to conquer her.

There was a scientist, a bit drunk at the time, perhaps, in some imperial gala, whose conversation with Soca went like this:

“Why, don’t you ever despair?” Soca asked.

“Certainty has little place in science, and despair is a pathology of certainty.”

“Really? What about doubt?”

“Doubt is only meaningful in opposition to certainty. You’d think science is full of doubt, but that is wrong. What you call doubt also has no place, because it is a hopeless doubt, where you feel there should be some dogma, some vain hope to believe in. No, we have something else, a merriment in emptiness and uncertainty, perhaps.”

“Irremediable incompleteness, the eternal presence of an absence.”

“Neatly put.”

“That’s about the raven in the poem. That’s what the raven is. Not science. A raven.”

“You’re a bird too. You have feathers round your neck and, and, on your head, where we have hair. You,” she poked him in the chest, “are the bird here. And now.”

“Yes? But also everywhere. And… forevermore.”

They laughed, and thus she was conquered, but perhaps alcohol took away from that specific victory.

There was even a temple-whore, one of those whose domains are crowned with a tattoo stating ‘To the god who knows’, and whose mantra is ‘I who am all pleasure, all ruin’ etc, who soon drunk from no other cup than that of the Doom-Bird.

They made rituals to the loas, they bound archetypes undying to their bodies and performed miraculous acts. For example, a few drops of snake blood (if the snake is suitably subtle), mixed with lemonade, poured on a green fire, thusly extinguished, was the opening gesture to summon Felomnel, the spirit of applying the correct amount of seasoning when cooking. While binding Felomnel, she could, for instance, draw perfect circles with pi equaling 3.23; hold burning embers in the inner surface of her elbows; or wear a top hat whose color would never be, with certainty, discerned by the casual observer. The deity would make her say:

“Selfish? This? No, no. What makes the world better in the end – that a handful of people be spared a little conflict and suffering, or that the world be filled with virile combat and madness of love? Or would you say ‘I have raptures of delight and excitement watching cactoi grow’, and be a gay?”

With a small amount of ground ceramics and the tears of a young hoopoe (driven to tears by particularly sublime pornography), consumed in a consecrated hookah with minted tobacco bubbled through rose-scented black tea, it was possible to invoke Sel-Fephxolett, a spirit of dreams instantly awakened from and degenerate drooling. Soca, binding that deity, could bite his elbow, write essays on the similarities between Kant, Mahavira and HPL and hold conversations with his lover like this:

“I love you, but…”

“Lie. Love admits no buts,” replied the god through his mouth.

“You’re wrong. And I don’t think you believe it.”

“No, I believe it. You’re the one who doesn’t believe it.”

“Well, yes. Of course I don’t.”

“Amazing, isn’t it?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Isn’t it awesome we can believe different things, being the dreams of the same mind?”

They never did dare try to invoke and bind the prophet Zarrothustra, who is not (as some foolishly claim) a deity of Chaos, but rather he is in charge (for all relevant sections of the multikosmos) of Reveling in Chaos, a much more important thing. What use, this poor old encyclopedia-keeper asks rhetorically, is there for annoying little Discordia (who talks and talks with no end in sight!) if no-one revels in her? If chaos were loathed all around – oh, truly, how tight the Prophet’s grasp on the raw forces of chaos. He (who is a He) alone giveth and taketh the possibility of dancing stars.

Pray ye not to chaos, because chaos is blind and childish; pray ye for the ability to play therein.

Chaos will seek ye out whether ye pray for it or not, anyway. Chaos is a predictable tiresomeness.

That aside, we spoke of the Doom-Bird’s conquests. Truly, they were many, but also they were marked by cool detached cruelty, and Socadillo tossed a coin at the crucial moment to decide whether he would actually consummate the seduction. Half the time, the ladies were left cold and alone; the rest loved via uncaring luck – not much warmer.

Dr. Kantonnen’s theory that he had pledged his love to Lady Chance is simply laughable and will deserve no further comment. He should go back to writing essays on ignoratio elenchi and agnotology, or the Burial of the Count of Orgaz in his ‘rapid autumn of libraries’. As if! La natura si perderebbe…

Ten years passed in this fashion. No longer at his athletic peak, he had left Real Megiddo for Arcanoi Mistanen, returning to Kubrik. He met Lady Iruike again (by then married to a fronxeshgi maharaja). The cherry blossoms told him she was in town, as he stood on the Silver Fountainhead Falls in Death-Mindfulness Park (then, as today, part of the NeoAlamut training complex for the Mistanen). He balanced himself, standing on the edge of one of his own feathers, held aloft by the foam and rainbows of the foam, practicing the wuxia fundamental of qinggong. The blossoms flew by him, and they recited Hitomaro:

In the Autumn mountains

The colored leaves are falling.

If I could hold them back,

I could still see her.

They recited Hitomaro:

The colored leaves

Have hidden the paths

On the autumn mountain.

How can I find my girl,

Wandering on ways I do not know?

They recited Hitomaro:

I waited for my

Lover until I could hear

In the night the oars of the boat

Crossing the River of Heaven.

They recited Hitomaro:

My girl is waiting for me

And does not know

That my body will stay here

On the rocks of Mount Kamo.

But suddenly they quoted the Lady Ise:

Is it your command

That we must pass through this life

Not meeting, even

For a space short as the nodes

Of the reeds of Naniwa?

And it was that way he knew she was visiting the city. He set forth to the maharaja’s new palace (to this day standing proudly a few blocks away from Needle Chill square, as the fronxeshgi’s embassy) and infiltrated the gardens hosting the harem. He went determinedly through the temptations, not stealing a thyme-flavored kiss from a tabeboyar tree-dame nor marveling at the quantum-level perfection and symmetry of an ejier she-cosmos-weaver. He found Iruike, that perfectly white being (as all kauin are), and she was playing an alabaster harp, singing,

They shall pass and their places be taken,

The gods and the priests that are pure... (usw)

Soca moved closer, laughing. She smiled without looking at him, and sung,

Kuraki yori… (usw)

Soca took his coin from his pocket. She strummed the harp, asking:

“I’d hope for at least a card game.”

Soca nodded. “Do you have any with you?”

She pulled a 46-card Sakafrojon Oracular Deck (their imperfect version of Avxêf Sakafrojon universities have developed) from her kimono. She felt confident, because she had an extra The Thus Come One card up her sleeve, one from another identical set. She dealt Soca two and three cards, and took for herself two and two, slipping the extra card in the second batch.

“Solace for one,” pledged Soca, “and these two take the Inviolate Order.”

“I cry Praxidike on this card,” she indicated, “and call on your solace.”

He revealed the card. It was The Rocking Blessing of Spring. On it was a hoopoe-angel asleep in a garden (for the hoopoe is a messenger that brings the news of spring). It bore the ancient inscription, dreamed by an almighty god long ago: The only sighs and whispers will be those read from holy books/ when the messenger awakens. Some versions of the deck included the word aloud, “read aloud from…”, while others omitted the second verse, and others had a third and fourth: “…awakens./ All witnesses will forget what they witnessed/ when the haze is raised.” “Witnesses” is rendered “martyrs” in the final variation, which ultimately are the same words in origin.

She flipped the top card from the pile to establish the Praxidike telos. It was A Constant Gardener. It had the inscription: Time will go by so perfectly it will be like an immutable now. The man in the drawing, dressed in a white jacketed suit, slept beside a single rose. The garden, many commentators observe, is a recurring symbol of the female body. Though that was not the only reason Iruike blushed.

“Footfalls echo in the memory… down the passage which we did not take… towards the door we never opened… into the rose-garden,” commented Soca. “Advantage for me.”

“Yes. What do you elate from the solace?”

“The Zahir-Nadir.”

She turned her card. It was a Spray People Carving. A waterfall whose foam became monk-like, white-clad figures, carving the riverbed. Another inscription from a god-dream: O marulho de teu coração, barulho surdo e ensurdecedor.

“Upon the garden?” Soca asked.

Iruike nodded. “ ‘How, they asked,/ Feeling our wings/ Shall we quit our vile bodies?/ -Die, they said.’ ”

He took the card from the top and showed it to her. It was a My Faithful Puglión.

He enunciated the ritual formula carefully. “Whence we may derive a new moral, which suggests, as might a proverb, that it is dangerous to lean over someone else’s void even if only to gaze, as in the depths of a well, at one’s own reflection: for that, too, is vanity.”

“Will you obsidian-dagger out the vegetative soul?”

“Yes, I choose your third card for shinjū grâce.”

She revealed it. It was The Thus Come One.

“If pratyekabuddhas, acute in understanding,

Without outflows, in their last incarnation,

Should fill the worlds in the ten dimensions,

As numerous as bamboos in a grove,

Though they should join together with one mind

For a million or for countless kalpas,

Hoping to conceive of teh Buddha’s true wisdom,

They could not understand the smallest part of it.”

Soca nodded. She had won.

She was gathering the cards, and then he said, “Let me count the cards,” sending the tiniest tremor up her spine.

He took the cards and counted aloud. There were forty-six.

So she had won, and thus they mated.

When morning came, she went to her harp, and sang:

“In India lives a bird that is unique:

The lovely phoenix has a long, hard beak

Pierced with a hundred holes, just like a flute –

It has no mate, its reign is absolute…”

By the time she had finished, he said to her, “I understand,” and left.

She went to the cards, and ordered them. There was her one extra The Thus Come One, but another card had luckily gone missing: the From Wren (a card associated with the mythical von Qambaxyr, the Utter Cynic, because cambaxirra is a regional name for the wren), with its inscription: Biting the fuck out of time, and shadows, and triangles.

For this reason, that most important turn in history occurred, and Socadillo entered a monastic life of celibacy, joining the Dragomirov Ergodic Orchestra.

-4-

These are the true and open votaries of Idleness, for whom she weaves the garlands of poppies, and into whose cup she pours the waters of oblivion…

“Art,” proclaimed Viscount Lorenz Gamdoha, the greatest maestro our universe ever knew, “is a carrot. I am not being whimsical. Art can only grow downwards. Beautiful is easy, sublime is a rush of blood to the head. Anything made remote (by some silly Catalonian sleight of hand) becomes an object of desire.”

This was the inaugural lecture for the musicians newly inducted to the DEO.

“In one of their greatest essays on aesthetics, a human once wrote: A phosphorescent jewel gives off its glow and color in the dark and loses its beauty in the light of day. Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty. Our thoughts do not travel to what we cannot see. The unseen for us does not exist. One may doubt this final statement on the grounds of lack of imagination. We might as well invoke the old aphorism that We have an imagination because the imagination of the reality-universe has us. As our condition of foggy dream-entities becomes clearer and the universe finally reaches a lucid dream, we become no longer ‘had’ by imagination, but rather by some other faculty, and so it is not surprising this eschaton is apocalypted as clarity in the moments where imagination is most forsaken.”

“To which I would like to add, for the benefit of your infinite ignorances, these lines: When the reader has done this, he might then begin to consider the brief pronouncements of the text as a series of mottoes such as he would copy out and hang on his wall (as is so often done in China and Japan), or as a series of texts for sermons or opening lines for essays. Since there is so little context or explanation included in the Analects itself, he may proceed to construct his own explanations of what the passage means to him and how it tallies with his own experience. (…) As one’s own experience broadens to match that of Confucius and his disciples, the pronouncements of the Analects will one by one light up with the light of personal recognition. Once this has happened, the words of the Analects will become for him the most succinct and poignant summation of that particular idea or experience, and he will understand to some degree why they have been regarded with such reverence. This is everything you need to know about canon. Just imagine reading a long tale with beautiful, puzzling epigraphs that don’t make much sense. They are there for your whole life, after the story itself has died in the heart of the teller.”

“Anyway, joining us in this event are former members of the emo band Wombat By Desolation, as well as a qliui sitarist and some midgets with harmonicas. Also Herr Udo Oversocks, a well-known techno harpsichordist and MC, whose personal interpretation of the Symphony for the nymph Cyane is quite interesting. Ah, Cyane. Yes, anyhow. How hard is it for a bird to sing like a nightingale? Either very easy or very difficult, I would surmise. Is this predetermination, that we have natures? I despise alcohol and those who drink alcohol. If you would not do something while sober, there is absolutely no excuse for doing it under any circumstances: this is a personal theory of reprehension, not necessarily derived from my aesthetic theory, only partially, as I hereby explain.”

“Proposition: beauty is a function of desire. As taught in ancient academies: The loss that lingers in every beautiful thing intensifies desire. Indeed if we did not age, if things did not disintegrate, the experience of beauty would be impossible. Without loss, desire could be fulfilled at will; things would exist for us as perfect resources, always potentially available for our use. That we can lose things, that in fact we are always in the process of losing everything we have, underlies the longing with which we inhabit the world. And in that longing resides the possibility of beauty. Thus I’d rather speak of supremacy in desire rather than beauty, because beauty is a wholly subjective function of desire, but desires can be measured and override one another in sacred conflict. Similarly, I speak of supremacy in belief rather than truth, and supremacy in decision rather than goodness – because truth and good are to belief and decision as beauty is to desire. Alcohol impairs our decision-making – as evidenced by poor, poor judgment shown in countless occasions – and thus, by the only ultimate measure of goodness, it makes us further from absolute good. And that is why Machiavelli is a force of morality.”

“What is light? Light is fundamental to music. For no other reason you are required to, upon waking, recite before a mirror: ‘Hail to the Buddha of Everlasting Light.’ For no other reason you swear like taught in the holy texts: ‘swearing by the light behind Their eyes’. That is what is revealed in what is inscribed in our paper handkerchiefs: ‘... there was nothing in him but memories of his own dream and his awakening, what had been and what was now; there was nothing in him yet but the indissoluble darkness prevailing before the Creation, before Genesis, when the Lord had not yet divided light from darkness and day from night, when the Lord had not yet distinguished dream from reality and reality from dream.’ That tells everything, as you’ll see.”

“In fact, that’s why, to be musicians, you have to symbolically crap in the tits of the mother-goddess. Because creation has nothing to do with birth. Birth is just a disgusting, damned process by which humankind is multiplied, and as some people once believed, intercourse and mirrors are both despicable for this same reason, because they multiply people. No, that disgusting tree of life thing, that fake cycle of birth and death – that’s idle nonsense from people who raise cattle and make corded-ware pottery. How I hate corded-ware pottery. They think they can see some wider universal pattern, but they are blind to the bacteria, to the phoenixes, to the self-begotten ones, to the simulacra, to those born out of pure light. No, great Creation is that ex nihil, via logos, like the ghosts a writer breathes life into, with words and aspects of words. It is not ‘Made in Vagina’ but a Behinotic set of influence-modes that does not entail generation or repetition – at worst History. Like once written: the central metaphor underlying ‘beginning’ is not really birth at all. It is rather the moment of waking from sleep, when one world disappears and another comes into being. This is still contained within a cycle: we know that at the end of the day we shall return to the world of sleep. But in the meantime there’s a sense of self-transcendence of a consciousness getting up from an unreal into a real or at least more real world. This sense of awakening into a greater degree of reality is expressed by Heraclitus as a passing from a world where everyone has his own logos, into a world where there’s a common logos (…) conscious perception, light and stability.”

“Yet the human Scripture I draw examples from is mostly sound-centered, not image-centered. Little is accurately, visually described (when it appears to be it’s often just as allegory of greatness and glory). What is said, however, is meant to be taken as if perfectly accurate in transcription. The words of prophets and God are, it indicates, what really matter, to the point that the messiah is not really a person but Logos, word made flesh. The exceptions are the beginning, when the garden is repeatedly seen to be good, and the end, when we all (we’re told) shall see and fear. Why this? Because history is understood to be a period of blind wandering in darkness (more precisely, in the fog that is vanity in the Biblical sense; consult the Hebrew origins of the word), in which one’s eyes are ultimately useless, and words are what we must depend on for guidance. So if Genesis is a waking up, it is a false awakening. This is a central idea in Cabala; I get the impression that when the final stage arrives, the first stage will reveal itself a huge illusion to be swept. Until then, we must attempt lucid dreaming.”

“It has been said of the tanka form of poetry that it is like a man holding two mirrors; in one mirror, he reflects a sight of nature; in the other, he reflects himself holding the first mirror, reflecting a sight of nature. The haiku is the form in which only the first mirror is held – it drops the introspection, the observer. Think about this. We see in a glass, but the glass is dark even when not broken. And many see not in a mirror, but in the reflective surface of a clock. All sights are juxtaposed with the ticking of the clock, ticking away life. Is that the condition of the wise man, or is the wise man like the dog, unaware of for whom the bell’s tolling? Perhaps the latter is the wise man, and the former is the musician. For it is certain dogs, for all their virtues, make poor music, unlike wolves.”

“And like the nature of wolves, we must think about the nature of us Gamezohans to conceive our music. Our utopist inclinations are of trains ahead of schedule, or never having to move at all, and disintegrating stuff at will. We conceive musical perfection, one would imagine, as that which brought down the walls of Jericho. Yet we are not so simply utilitarian, are we? We value wastefulness as a sign of abundance of quality. In war, we are comfortable with ‘noble kills’, those when the enemy is fighting back, because it confirms our strength, but we really enjoy the sneaky take-down, because it confirms our cunning. But we follow the rules of the game so often that whenever we break them, it’s a true surprise. Like the Tao, we are ruthless, and have no love of others’ life, but neither are we particularly stalwart in defense of our own life and convenience. We can and do kill defenseless people remorselessly after a rational calculation of the outcome, but this grim calculus is untainted by a desire to avoid danger for ourselves, or to evade a test of skill. Besides, if we follow a moral statement at all, it is ‘rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared’ – a trans-imperial truism. We don’t seek to be feared by our “enemies”, but understood. Once understanding is achieved, the enmity is no more: the enemy has transcended its defects that placed it in opposition to the Gamezohans. Because to understand us is to submit in utter humility to our perfection, it is the exact same informational content, just like when a destructive bit of information is inserted into a computer, just like the gaze of the basilisk, it is impossible to separate the message from its effects. Our civilization hacks into cosmic genius.”

“But when all is said and done, there is a bit of despair in our stalwartness, like in Hemingway machismo squared. ‘This is the world. It’s fucked up’, tells us. ‘Nothing matters much, but remaining manly in these conditions at least shows you can do something most are unable to.’ We are very similar, but with coolness. We live, as often observed, in a world that is not very consistent, badly narrated, prone to recourse to obfuscating pedantry, and ever ridiculous. Being handed a plateful of humility by the fickle gods is always around the corner, yet we try to remain cool and pompous, even if by embracing our flaws and preempting debasement. Why? I’d say we are like the men who look back as in that poem, the one that goes:”

“Maybe one morning walking in air

of dry glass, I'll turn and see the miracle occur -

nothingness at my shoulders, the void

behind me - with a drunkard's terror.

Then, as on a screen, the usual illusion:

hills houses trees will suddenly reassemble,

but too late, and I'll quietly go my way,

with my secret, among men who don't look back.”

“We, collectively, as a culture, have peeked outside and seen the vacuum, the horror, the blind idiot nuclear deity Azathoth, and from that point of view nothing in this world remains too humbling. As in the famous death-poem of the warrior Fuse Yajiro: Seen from/ outside creation/ earth and sky/ aren’t worth/ a box of matches. Why do we see? I suppose it’s inevitable after a certain event horizon of flawlessness, of depuration from the contingencies of sentience. As certain as color/ Passes from the petal,/ Irrevocable as flesh,/ The gazing eye falls through the world. A critic may speak of a self that longs, in Foucault’s terms, for status as a “subject”. The word will evoke to us, more than psychiatric hell, the matter of rulership, so central in Confucianism and Taoism. So when he says, it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance, our thoughts drift to Master Sun and we can’t help but admire a certain Absolute Good dimension to existential tyranny. We do believe more than anyone else that the hard work of serious reading mirrors the hard work of serious governing… reading that must be a self-sacrificial ordeal at times. I have put a section of a poem to music; if you’ll indulge me…”

Gamdoha sat at the pipe organ and played, while an assistant mezzo-soprano solo’d:

“But bringing up the rear of this bright host

A Spirit of a different aspect waves

His wings, like thunder-clouds above some coast

Whose barren beach with frequent wrecks is paved;

His brow was like the deep when tempest-toss'd;

Fierce and unfathomable thoughts engraved

Eternal wrath on his immortal face,

And where he gazed a gloom pervaded space.”

Gamdoha stood up and continued: “Some say no one will be saved until everyone is saved. Perhaps we believe that, as we’ve gone beyond happiness.”

“Sargonid” Jones, immortal player of the triangle, stood up and addressed the rest of the audience. “He is right you know! The full HORROR of this season transcends your feeble human notions of joy and despair! Such emotions, coursing through your feeble human neural pathways, are merely metonymies, placeholders, if you will, for the ULTIMATE COSMIK (sic) WINTER OF THE GODHEAD in which the life-essence is cleaved from the immortals and devoured by the dark lord of the lowest realms, tears of eternity coalescing like glass blossoms in the air around his blood-bower as the universe utters the greatest blasphemy against love. It is a beautiful sight and fills the heart with joy, but it disallows all future enjoyment, as if the human soul were a labyrinth that crumbled behind the footsteps of the Black Walker.”

“Well, perhaps you hit that Nocello too strongly this morning, eh.” Gamdoha despised drinkers. “Oh, as the proverb goes, all combat takes place at night, in the rain, and at the junction of four map segments. I have an assignment for this crew. In the Légende de saint Julien l’Hospitalier, it is spoken of a firmament of raptor eyes, unless memory fails me. Think of birds, those dinosaur-remnants, and their eyes on prey. Hunting falcons in icy, medieval gothic terror-lands. Lorca speaks of a horizon of dogs in his most erotic poem (arguably). Sound, vision and entity confused so insightfully? What I want is you to complement that firmament and that horizon with a proper landscape of architecture – specifically, that first truly urban, truly artificial locus, location: the labyrinth. Brainstorm for me a labyrinth of cats, and music it, milk those cats for delicious music.”

And so they did, confusing though the instructions were, especially from a felidaelactological standpoint.

-5-

I nearly always work from ideas rather than sounds. Titles. It's that title that just fascinates me. It's fabulous. I mean, I am interested in strategy, and the idea of it. I'm not Maoist or any of that; if anything, I'm anti-Maoist. Strategy interests me because it deals with the interaction of systems, which is what my interest in music is really, and not so much the interaction of sounds.

Oversocks: “It was written in the source beyond all sources: I imagined that net of tigers, that teeming labyrinth of tigers, inflicting horror upon pastures and flocks in order to perpetuate a design. We could start with that.”

The Sargonid: “There’s that tale of ‘The Labyrinth of Sweet Infinity’ of dreams within dreams, maybe we can connect it with the script of the deity.”

Oversocks: “In that sense we can say ‘Private judgment belongs in dreams, in which, as Heraclitus says, each man is his own Logos.’ I’ll try to dig up some bit of ‘world music’ we can reuse.”

Likai Yyl, of Wombat by Desolation, said: “I just remembered something that might be useful… I toppled off my pyrotechnic tiger and, as I plunge downwards, endlessly as Lucifer, I ask myself: ‘What is the most miraculous event in the world?’ And I answer myself: ‘I am going to fall into my own arms. They stretch out to me from the bottom of the pit.’”

Soca: “Fairly Escherian. How about this bridge for this riff:

Watch it fall,

the container of ashes,

for a long time,

a long, long time,

from a great height,

a great, great height.

Do I look pleased?

(In parable you have lost.)”

The Sargonid: “I like that. A labyrinth can have a false center. In fact that is part of the signature style of the great landscapist Galahad “Misogyny” Barnes y Dactylos. The false center can be a trap. Cobwebs spun in the sky. For a labyrinth and a spider web are not quite distinct, like a labyrinth of dreams within dreams and a dream-catcher. You may fall from the labyrinth, falling from the tiger and falling from the sky at the same time. To catch and hold may be a good thing when we remember Thou lettest man flow on like a river… in context.”

Likai Yyl: “I remembered more from the same: …and I would give this whirlwind, which has driven me to all the four rounded corners of the globe, the emblematic form of a tiger, the most ferocious of beasts, whose pelt yet bears the marks of a flagellation which must have taken place before the dawn of time.”

Soca: “Mmm. So are the marks whip-marks or writing of the god?”

Likai Yyl: “Both, evidently. Why wouldn’t god write in scars? A writer crueler than that which if on a winter’s night. What else are memories?”

Oversocks: “Alright, I found this bit for the repeating background vocals:”

Xéco, xéco, xéco, Ô ni-ba-rá! (x3)

Ogunmanjô, marnô (etc)

The Sargonid: “If we’ll have a fall, let it be a Leverkühn fall.”

All nodded in agreement.

Soca tapped his pen. “Cats? Clawdia Chauchat. Hot cat. Sick cat. Last gasp of youth.”

The Sargonid: “Good line. Kyrgyz eyes. Degenerate, morbid, Asiatic-weary: very gothic.”

Oversocks: “We can also take that into the legendary Light of them. Thus getting light for our labyrinth; making it of light.”

Yyl: “Cosmetics are not about illusory ephemera. Illusory and ephemerous is reality. It is a placeholder for the ultra-solid universals. The process of entering our reality is not in-carnation, the adding of a body, a plus, to a body-less spirit; it is an emptying, to use St. Paul’s expression. It is a loss. When cosmetics brush aside ‘truth’, this fake ‘reality’, we can temporarily tap what’s ultimate and ideal. Cosmos, after all, means Order. Hence the stars as jewels.”

Oversocks: “How very Platonic. But also very apropos. Let me try to recall the Praise… ah, yes: Our ancestors cut off the brightness on the land from above and created a world of shadows, and far in the depths of it they placed woman, marking her the whitest of beings. If whiteness was to be indispensable to supreme beauty, then for us there was no other way, nor do I find this objectionable. The white races are fair-headed, but our hair is dark; so nature taught us the laws of darkness, which we instinctively used to turn a yellow skin white.”

Soca: “Amusingly politically incorrect. Otherwise, exactly what we need. Our white tiger, which also Does not in its arboreal gloom/ Distil so rank a feline smell und so weiter.”

The Sargonid: “In Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I the white-some woman is dressed in gold, eyed pyramids in gold, the pyramids with eyes that mean so much to the initiated.”

Yyl: “Unlike the jewel, a star shines of its own light, which is why, it’s been said, the objects of our world may be conceived as symbols, as representations of the stars. Perfectly mirrored surfaces, especially those of liquid substrata, are crystallized processes of worship. A mythical entity may make a jewel of starlight, a silmaril, which we may use, for argument’s sake, as the object of our longing; and the world may be a labyrinth of mirrors, each a pool reflecting the moon or a cloudscape or thirty birds. I do not know what follows from the example because I never left the labyrinth, the ice cenotaph of the world; I have always been alone.” Yyl sighed.

Soca: “You’re really in the gloom, eh. Well, mirrors lead me to: [Kierkegaard] suffers from one great literary defect, which is often found in lonely geniuses: he never knows when to stop. Lonely people are apt to fall in love with the sound of their own voice, as Narcissus fell in love with his reflection, not out of conceit but out of despair of finding another who will listen and respond. Obviously, as it’s said, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.”

Oversocks: “Narcissism always works. After all, the spider weaving the trap is the protagonist himself: he is falling into his own arms as he falls from the tiger. The labyrinth is some sort of mirage, or at least displaced light, created out of solipsist narcissism. Which reminds me of the Metamorphosis of Narcissus painting by Dali.”

Yyl: “Love listens, and paler than ashes,/ Through his curls as the crown on them slips,/ Lifts languid wet eyelids and lashes,/ And laughs with insatiable lips./ Thou shalt hush him with heavy caresses,/ With music that scares the profane;/ Thou shalt darken his eyes with thy tresses,/ Our Lady of Pain.”

The Sargonid: “We can take the basic beat from that. I am, however, reminded of this since we began speaking of light and displaced images of light: God’s mystical attributes are such worlds of light in which the dark nature of En-Sof manifests itself.”

Oversocks: “I image we’ll work towards a fulfilling ending. Something in the spirit of I am happy even before I have a reason./ I am full of light even before the sky/ Can greet the sun or the moon. ”

Soca: “But less gay, evidently. I prefer the type that goes I want to have my throat slashed while violating...”

The Sargonid: “Perhaps we can compromise a Skies at dawn–/ Is this reality?/ Amida Butsu. That’s not as important, since we’ve already mixed up all metaphors for day and night anyway. We just have a beautiful combat, like a gladiator and a tiger in the labyrinth. From Ronda the fire.”

Yyl: “No moment where the audience goes ‘Well, fuck, what a bummer. That came out of nowhere.’? How can we expect applause otherwise?”

Oversocks: “We just have to be subtle about the elusive-ghost-reflection-mirage.”

The Sargonid: “Meaninglessness being key.”

Yyl: “And as in all things lovely, the stupider the better. Alright.”

Soca: “The sexiest arm position: the object of longing lying on her side, arm following curves: elbow fits the side of the stomach, then forearm upward against hip, and finally hand falling down again, dainty, fingertips soft against thigh.”

The Sargonid: “You digress, kid. Let’s just prepare a draft of the score and words therefor.”

Soca: “That should be quite a lot of work?...”

Oversocks: “Nah, as they say… Everything in these unique skills is secondhand, everything about these incomparable accomplishments is repetitious. The reason is that everything has always already begun; the incredible has already been heard and, beyond memory, the words have spoken from the depths of language. The wonder is that every renewed beginning starts from the unique, and reproduces it exactly, but duplicated and irreducible. The mechanism and the scenes already contain their final results, just as the words are hidden in the process whose function was to bring them to the surface.”

Soca: “What?”

Yyl: “He means we’ll just use a lot of poor harmonies and poorer rhymes.”

And thus was the universe made. Well, not then but in a similar process. They just wrote a song that was like the opening chime for Windows 95 but lasting fourteen hours.

-6-

…an alteration in the perception or experience of the external world so that it seems strange or unreal. Other symptoms include feeling as though one's environment is lacking in spontaneity, emotional colouring and depth.

The Viscount Lorenz Gamdoha, around that time, put Ezra Pound’s cantos to music. It was musical performance at its most sublime. Bagpipes blared and the Theremins cushioned the tabla beats. Midgets with harmonicas hid beneath the seats of the audience to explode their angry choruses in climaxes before allowing the paper bags with nail clippings to begin their mighty crescendos that paragon’d the arrow of time and the certainty of quantum accuracy.

They were playing, Soca among them, the maestro chugging in bread doused in olive oil and ground pepper and cursing sailorfully to the castratos (“faithless cuntjew! dickless wrong-music cuckold! butt-raided illiterate!”), who recited in impeccably decadent cadence:

~*~

“…the serpent

neschek whose name is known, the defiler

The canker corrupting all things, Fafnir the worm,

Wenn-maker, corrupter of all things.

Darkness the defiler,

Passing the doors of temples, defiling the Grove of Paphos,

neschek, the crawling evil,

slime, the corrupter of all things,

Poisoner of the fount,

of all fountains, neschek,

The serpent, evil against Nature's increase,

Against beauty

A thousand are dead in his folds,

in the eel-fisher's basket

Χαϊρη! Ω Διώνη, Χαϊρη

pure Light, we beseech thee

Crystal, we beseech thee

Clarity, we beseech thee

from the labyrinth

“A pity that poets have used symbol and metaphor

and no man learned anything from them

for their speaking in figures.”

All other sins are open,

"with the silver spilla...

amber, caught up and turned..."

Lotophagoi

(Feared neither death nor pain for this beauty;

If harm, harm to ourselves.)”

~*~

At which point carabinieri invaded the opera and took Viscount Lorenz Gamdoha, the great maestro. He was tried by chancellor Moebius and executed by T-Rex made of lasers. In lieu of last meal, he watched that episode with the line “The usual procedure is to leap 200 feet in the air and scatter yourself over a wide area” before leaving for the gallows-moon.

His last words were “Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible. But it’s oh so cold; the flame is oh so weak.”

He then added, “You all suck so much. Fuck you guys. Fucking bullshit.” He is remembered as a martyr of the most elevated aesthetics and incontestably perfect politics.

The exact political circumstances of his death have been attributed to his authoring the following humorous tract:

~*~

Bushthulhu sleeps in its haze of delusion. Rumsathoth armpit-farts the soothing rhythm that keeps him asleep, dreaming a world that has little to do with reality, but occasionally overlaps with ours, because of the cultists who adore Bushthulhu in their madness. And Rumsathoth sings, endlessly, a chorus:

 

I think what you'll find,

I think what you'll find is,

Whatever it is we do substantively,

There will be near-perfect clarity

As to what it is.

 

And it will be known,

And it will be known to the Congress,

And it will be known to you,

Probably before we decide it,

But it will be known.

 

One day, Rumsathoth will stop singing, and his master will wake. And then the world Bushthulhu believes in will cease being a dream, and will become our reality.

And it will be known.

That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

~*~

But the truth is otherwise. He was killed per a conspiracy. Per a certain Trust established by an obscure importer millennia earlier. The Trust found about Socadillo Mosahn’s music, how Tiger “visiting the hedge that is a swamp” Composition #62 was exactly what they were waiting for.

Count Gamdoha out of the way, a certain Max went and gathered Soca and other musicians and took them to a beach in Gris-Rama-Rama, in another time and chapter entirely, to play Song For Coati, covering The Gosling And Kiwi Harmonics for the benefit of some people who were there.

You see, this explains everything there ever happened. I personally weep at how perfectly all loose strings are gathered together. It is truly an enlightened moment. You’re excused if you feel like getting drunk right now, I know I will. woo!!!!! \o/

-7-

For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.

When she killed him, she found the From Wren card in his breast pocket.

 

 

Spatula: the Egg-Making (and other equally cyberpunk stories)

No, actually, the title is

Mnemodictyon Dia-bollein: A Segment of a Larger Narrative (covered by ‘The Artist Formerly Known As Apotropaic Apophenia’)

-1-

That is, the sublime poet is one who can unloose so compelling a force of tropes that the reader takes them for literal revelation and lives them out. She is made over in “the image of the imagery,” in Kenneth Burke’s phrase.

Cyt0r1, L33t Princess of Nova Zona, was honoring the opening night of the Empyreal Raum übernightclub. It was also a date with Mimou Al-Kabyle, a wealthy-beyond-wealth prince of shady dealings and three times her age. He actually had quite the low profile for a playboy of his echelon, but more importantly, he played a mean plasma pong and was not a total llama with AI security through-coding, which (together with his piercing eyes, mysterious bearing and mature good looks) had bought him a first chance. His screen-name was Indra*trans, from ‘indeterminacy of radical translation’, and thus he became Irt for Cyt0r1. The couple was in the company of four of Cyt0r1’s friends: Bangkok, whose ‘vis pacman para bellum’ t-shirt confirmed everything his neckbeard suggested (ah but he descended from Zhou Yu!! he’d mention gratuitously); ‘Mad’ Iikka, Cyt0r1’s latest ex, main hobbies dressing in drag and stabbing people with monofilament butterfly knives (he came from a long family of Red Mages but only wore a white feather in his hair and a ring of protection +1d20); and cyclically lovers/mortal enemies Zglinka, youngest female recipient of the Roscoe Medal For Mathematical Excellence (ironically her counterproof of everything Roscoe stood for in his mathematical life was her particular supreme achievement), and Shiori, second in command in Cyt0r1’s Picanço Security Group clan of information pirates (also a ninja).

They sat resting for further dancing. Seats and table were hovering black marble monoliths, held firmly in the air by one or another mysterious force. Their cups instantly synthesized whatever drink they willed through nanotechnology, billing over a combination of molecules used, energy expended and brand royalties. Needless to say, the group had, each individually, hacked with their multitools the system to eliminate the latter element, not because of avarice, but as a matter of principle against all intellectual property.

“Done and done. I’m obviously first,” said Cyt0r1, ever self-satisfied.

“I guess I’m second,” said Al-Kabyle.

“Third,” said Shiori and Bangkok simultaneously. They glared at one another, but laughed after a moment.

“I’m fourth, but I simultaneously found a completely new demonstration for the Fourth Theorem of Psychohistory. Suck on that, L-chan.”

“Fuuuuuck,” drawled Iikka grinning. “What should I be doing again?”

“And that, bitsy pookums, is why I left you.”

“I thought it was because I stabbed you and you just lied there in the air-conditioned gutter bleeding to death while the city rain and neon lights on your face reminded you of a song or several?”

“That too,” conceded Cyt0r1. “But eventually the nanomachinery kicked in.”

“Yeah, I was checking out your upgrades. Awe-inspiring stuff.”

“Mama forced me to have it installed,” slight pout.

“But we really pimped it up, though, didn’t we?” said Shiori grinning.

“Main thing, we disabled the Triple Eye surveillance subroutines,” said Bangkok. “And the Damocles ones, for that matter.”

DJ Slippery Slippery Slippery Slope announced: “Systems to the max for the next song! Full transcendence algorithms deploy! Techno is the feverish pulse of existence, ladies, gentlemen and naughty, naughty deviations thereof! This is the sound of you learning to leave the flesh!” The beat became so fast and so cunning the hairs in their bodies could feel space and time being tripped.

“Awesome. Let’s dance this one,” shouted Shiori.

Zglinka did not respond but commented, her naturally low voice barely audible even shouting: “The physical universe is a stupid bottleneck. Places like this take it to the limit, but virtual reality has long made this stuff obsolete.”

“Don’t be so certain. Reality always has a card up its sleeve.” Al-Kabyle did not shout, but they could read his lips clearly with a voice realer than sound. Cyt0r1 found that bit of nonchalant coolness very hot.

“This one will be great. Are you joining me, Irt, or should I dance with the shadows?”

“I’m sure he’ll dance,” shouted Iikka. “The shadows are for lonely wankers like the Banging Cock!”

“I don’t see you accompanied either,” objected the fat one.

Zglinka shook her head laughing. “You know Mad, he’ll get what he can find and will find what he can get…”

Cyt0r1 couldn’t hear the rest of the exchange as Al-Kabyle pulled her firmly to the folding broken-dimensional dance hyperfloor. It became not so much a matter of motion of the body but a grokkin’ fusion of observer and observed as what’s objective became less solid and responded to the minds of the dancers, to how they reacted to the whole thing. And what music – the masterpiece of DJ 4S, mixing samples from ChromeDome songs with instrumental loops of the Dragomirov Ergodic Orchestra and the endless beat that almost disappeared when you stopped paying attention to it, blending with reality, or rather taking its place.

Chromelips meowed something that ended with,

Ringed round with a flame of fair faces,

And splendid with swords.

She felt Al-Kabyle’s body against hers and was to her confusion vaguely repulsed by how much older he was – or rather she felt he was somehow ancient without being old, a lot of things done folded into a short allotment of overt time. She looked aside. Bangkok danced with one of the tactile holograms, one of the shadows, who – this must be admitted – were the best dancers of all, but never tangible enough, never enough.

Rash, inconsiderate, fiery voluntaries,

With ladies’ faces and fierce dragons’ spleens,

Have sold their fortunes at their native homes,

Bearing their birthrights proudly on their backs,

To make a hazard of new fortunes here.

And then samples from old songs over Chromelips’ wordless, spine-tingling purrs:

Along the coast you'll hear them boast

About a light they say that shines so clear.

Colors and lights and images were flashing with her thoughts. She saw Shiori and Zglinka spinning in the air, tangled passionately, fusing.

Never wait a moment when you share your love

Below the shiny, sparkly stars alight above!

She saw visions of her grandfather being cast from Heaven at the same time she saw Iikka in total bliss, sandwiched between an elegant yuppie and his companion.

So how come it looks so beautiful?

How come the moon falls from the sky?

She looked up to Al-Kabyle’s face and saw he did not stop staring at her for one second. She looked into his eyes – into pure intensity, into a past of infinite secrecy – and felt true fear for the first time in her life.

Chromelips murmured:

it gets you down

it gets you down

it cuts you up

it takes you high

well? shall we go?

yes, let's go

they do not move.

And the music ended suddenly, shatteringly, dancers caught mid-kiss, caught in the aftermath of a grope, awarded some innominable epiphany, some abominable epiphany, and they felt their souls bare for a while. For the rest of their lives they would remember that moment as the high-water mark of whatever mind-expansion they might have chosen to seek thereafter. They all laughed, and it was pure laughter for quite some time before the old mundane worries, lusts, vanities returned to fill the vacuum.

Only Al-Kabyle did not laugh, but even he was touched by the song, much to his surprise.

“Let’s go out,” he whispered.

“Okay,” she said.

-2-

One of the effects of Hamlet’s grief would seem to be a sense of dislocation: his speech surprises us in part because of the velocity with which he shifts perspectives. Thus Frank Kermode speaks of the mind of Hamlet in terms of “its affective power, its ‘negative capability’ or failure to assert any of the possible ethical or metaphysical positions it creates.” Hamlet’s situation is vertiginous and it entails great suffering, but it may also be a source of eloquence. (…) One might even make the case that Hamlet’s delays are motivated, in some measure, by a desire to sustain his eloquence and his newly acquired vision. Killing Claudius would, perhaps, change Hamlet’s relation to language and perception; he would lose his inventive energy. (…) (Hamlet’s fate suggests that the unwillingness to seek some kind of closure may lead to self-ruin, as speculation takes him further and further from normative, communal standards, rendering him more alien and dangerous, a more likely “scapegoat.”)

They walked silently, leaving through a fire exit.

She said, “Music can be too good.”

“Especially when you’re not expecting it.”

“Yeah.” She watched tiny scurrying shadows distractedly. “Thistle toad, whistle woad…”

They were out in a dark alley. Graffiti on the wall read ‘I have seen the shroud!’. There was a read-o-future machine on the wall.

“You want a credit chip?”

“Don’t be silly, Irt. I can hack this thing with a potato and a pair of rusty wires. It’s freaking ancient.”

Welcome, said the machine.

“What question will you ask?”

Cyt0r1 shrugged. “Well, ‘is there balm in Gilead?’ is the standard question the Oracle engine fills in if you do not input any.”

“I see.”

She thought a little.

“What’s the essence of the noosphere?”

The machine whirred, and recited:

But ere by letter he could tell the tale

Unto the Christian Emperor, the youths

Sank into blessed dreams again, and waked

Within a crystal city where was peace.

She looked at Al-Kabyle, who did not look at her directly. He asked:

“What are they doing in this world?”

The machine whirred, and recited:

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

Which you cannot visit,

Not even in your dreams.

She asked, “What else about them?”

They were also shepherds

who tended to each and every one of their little sheep,

producers of fragrances, and winegrowers,

and hence they loved the sun.

They first planted vineyards in their restless,

warlike dreams,

and then in reality.

He asked, “But are they aware?”

Throughout the frosty night

I lay awake. When morning bells

rang out, my heart grew clear—

upon this fleeting dream-world

dawn is waking.

“Cute,” said Cyt0r1. “It quotes verse vaguely pertinent through some trivial linguistic heuristics.”

“No… I think you know it’s not that simple.”

She nodded, and they were silent.

“Let’s exchange sudden gifts,” he said.

“Let’s.”

He dug around in his pockets. Finally, he gave her a slip of paper saying IOU a soft-drink stand. She gave him a quizzical look.

“A universe once gave that to some guy. I don’t remember where I got it.”

She nodded, and opened her backpack. Eventually she found a purple glass hippopotamus.

“Wow,” he said.

“I went to my uncle’s office once and he told me I could take whatever I wanted from his shelves. I liked this best.”

“It’s awesome.”

“Yeah, isn’t it?”

“Nobody can make sense of a purple glass hippopotamus.”

He played with a ring he wore, and small pocket dimension opened in midair. He placed the hippopotamus in it.

“Swell ring.”

“Maa shaa Allah.”

“What?”

“It means ‘God gave it to me’. It’s just something we say, to remind us we have to be grateful for our things, even those we think we conquered through our merits.”

“I’m not that keen on God,” she said.

He laughed. “It’s to be expected.”

She shook her head. “Nah, it’s not just because of my grandfather who is Lucifer.”

He looked into her deeply, clearly. “Destiny casts quite a shadow,” he mused.

Cyt0r1 blushed. “Irt, what…”

He interrupted her with a gesture, and looked up. A pack of organ-muggers, ultraheavy with cybernetic implants, fell around them from the rooftops nearby. They circled in, combining wolf-life primal hunting instinct algorithms with luminous high-tech holographic gun sights. That stuff.

-3-

The flowers remind us to reawaken into desire. The funeral, in its ceremonial beauty and dignity, enables our suffering and also intends to return us to life. It plays on our longing for desire itself, reminds us that we must start desiring again or relinquish the world.

“I suggest, for your sake, that you leave,” said Al-Kabyle. They laughed like hyenas. (They were hardly going to discourse in iambic pentameter.)

The leader, a hairless hermaphrodite whose robotic hands had a laser in each fingertip, responded: “Interesting suggestion, but we’ll stick to the original plan of raping you and then killing you to steal your organs and precious brain data.”

“To quote my grandfather,” said Cyt0r1, mischievously, “who is, I’m told, the Devil, ‘I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You had the look of someone who was about to be flamboyantly stupid.’ Do you know what every word in there means or do you need it chemically encoded?”

The leader screamed in anger as its hands exploded. The other gangsters fired their weapons, exploding large sections of wall, but their sights had also been hacked by Cyt0r1’s defensive implants.

Al-Kabyle pulled a gun-shaped thing from inside his suit and it began unfolding a space-time blade. He placed it diagonally across his face in a blessing while shouting, “Hail Eris! All hail Discordia!”

The punks had either switched their guns to manual or were charging with thyberium claws and monofilament autonomous whips. Cyt0r1 was actively disabling their gear remotely with incredible agility, waving her hands as she marked the arcs and layers to be scanned and taken over. The thugs’ adrenal-enhanced reflexes were barely enough to approach her. Eye implants made the owners blind, cortical implants were detonated remotely, limbs refused to move, and the static and blue screens disabled many. Those who did remain combat-worthy were run through by Al-Kabyle. He held the body of his every victim, lowering them gently to the ground, applying a light kiss on their lips and closing their eyes with a mute prayer, before moving on to the next swift like a pouncing tiger. Whatever shots would hit him or Cyt0r1 were parried and deflected by his weapon, which had precognition capabilities, allowing him to always be in the exact best position to protect himself and his companion.

The battle did not last long.

“Lots of fun. I love this city,” the girl said.

Al-Kabyle watched the blood slide down his weapon, like mud from a lotus petal. “Congratulations on your combat hacking. I’d have taken far longer to renormalize them all by myself.”

“I noticed your combat style. You’ve had Assassin-Undertaker training, haven’t you?”

He took long to reply. “Yes.”

“But you also use Zarrothustrist dervish techniques.”

He looked at her sideways. “One has no rules, is not precise. Family motto.”

“Great. Are you some kind of spy? I once dated this double-six nine guy but he had some silly scruple against underage partners.”

They started walking away from the alley. “Mm-hmm, when was that. You’re already of marriageable age in most cultures. Even though you insist on acting younger for some cute, perverted reason.”

“Namely – it makes me look cute and perverted.”

“I don’t like being the bearer of bad news, because it has got me shot a dozen times already, but you’ll have to grow up and become responsible some day.”

“My mother has managed to remain irresponsible and childish through adulthood.”

“Good point. But perhaps you’re meant for something greater than your mother.”

“There you go again. Are you a religious nut? Or a spy? Or both, a terrorist or something?”

“It’s been said that there are no terrorists.”

“Well that’s an ostrich prize if anything. It’s like saying there is no global warming, or evil. But yeah, let’s not digress. What are you really?”

“A bit of everything.”

“How are you so competent?”

“He attains because he has no alternative. Family motto.”

“And how do you pretend to know so much about me?”

“To answer a question is to consolidate the mental level on which the question is asked. Family motto.” He added defensively, “I come from many families.”

She stuck out her tongue. “You’re such a good liar, disguised as a bad liar.”

He raised his eyes to the perennial industrial nanosmog above, alight with neon reflections and holographic angels. “If I spoke prose, you'd all find out, I don't know what I talk about! Family—OW, ok, enough of that one. Yeah, good, disguised as bad, disguised as good, disguised as bad, more like.”

She laughed. “Watch out for St. Matthias’ dance.”

He looked upwards, as if into someplace up there, far away, and replied, “It’s the name of my game.”

She stopped walking. “Is that why ‘Indeterminacy of Radical Translation’?”

He sighed. “Congratulations.”

“I never knew of anyone actually suffering from the Dance. I thought it was just some weird-ass psychologists’ hypothesis.”

“Einstein said of the scientists’ condition: We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open, and we try hard to discuss what is inside and what is not. Well, Ms. Syne, you are standing in front of a closed box. I hear you can open anything. Are you up to the challenge?”

-4-

As a mnemonist, he is characterised by a passive-receptive attitude that precludes organised striving, by limitations of intellect concealed behind his capacity for thought and imagination, and by his tendency to be a dreamer whose fantasies constitute another world through which he transforms his everyday experiences.

Beating the serum of the kolad plant produces a white foam with metallic glint that, given the appropriate amounts of sugar or artificial sweetening, is quite delectable when floating on a substratum of, e.g., frothy, scalding hot espresso. A machine with the serial number #664.278.763.484, distribution Nova Zona, designed to produce such a beverage on command, is located in the residence of Pergula Syne. It is controlled by a sophisticated artificial intelligence that does not have a whole lot to do, as mightily intelligent as it is idle. Named by its mistresses ‘Che’. Che spends a lot of time asleep, dreaming (as machines, we’re noticing, are wont to do).

A steaming cup of Che’s craft is in Cytori’s hand as she sits among turquoise Persian cushions, daydreaming while half-plugged into a Thanhnien-Visualcast, which she watched.

Whereupon the son: "I know not," he said, "what you say, nor why they should be naughty things: for my part I have as yet seen nought that seemed to me so fair and delectable. They are fairer than the painted angels that you have so often shewn me. Oh! if you love me, do but let us take one of these goslings up there, and I will see that she have whereon to bill."

“Hee,” she thoughtsaid, “go-o-os… lings.”

A small grayscale naked man flew towards her, large glasses and small butterfly wings. He carried a small briefcase with the logo of Sawarren Couriers Discorp.

“Are you,” he asked, very seriously, “she who operates under the handle ---ftwCyt0r1wtf--- ?”

“Whoooo’s asking?” She did the mental equivalent of caressing the trigger of a powerful wyrm she had on her equivalent of a pocket but on the internet. “Hee. Moose asking.”

“Are you,” the little man tried again, “not a girl who misses much, doot dododo do-do, oh yeah?”

“Right. That. Yeah, I’m not. Hoo.”

“I have a message. Are you sound of mind enough right now or should I return with paramedics?”

“Just some chemicoh-oh-oh-als. An accident. Raiding a vault at Rockthriller’s. Nothing too bad,” she looked at her hands. She could see a coffee mug. The coffee mug contained some traces of an ancient archipelago where voodoo economists harvested prestige and built massive ziggurats out of permutations of the Xiangjie jiuzhang suanfa wherein to birth overmen. When they ran out of prestige, the archipelagoes became deserted but for stillborn overmen, who roamed their star-pattern’d, star-energy’d Moai-Mausolea bemoaning the fickleness of the satrap of stormy weather of autumn and the banality of women. As they wandered the empty, windy halls soaked in silvery light, they moaned things like

A dream is a garden of devils, and all dreams in this world were dreamed long ago. Now they are simply interchanged with equally used and worn reality, just as coins are exchanged for promissory notes and vice versa, from hand to hand…

and stated things such as

Further point:

Swirling colours exist; beautiful, intense colours. And yet, there are some, of the dry, dull persuasion, who oppose them. They take the intensity, and seek to acidify it, make it poisonous. Make anyone who embraces those colours—SHUN them, far away.

One day an overman abortion tuned into a rock and roll station and became The Chosen One. He still did the same things as the others, but he also preached that

There is but one Eye and it is all eyes; one Mind and it is all minds; one time and it is Now.

and

Vehicle 3a loves it in a permanent way, staying close by in quiet admiration from the time it spots the source to all future time.

and

That poor boy, he never got to kick the football.

He climbed the highest ziggurat, the one that had, facing north, a large orb of fluid cobalt that was called The Eye. On the ziggurat’s top he built himself a Throne of Frost, and announced to the whole archipelago that

Stopping time for himself, he would arrest it also on the Island, infinitely delay her death, because by now everything that happened to Lilia depended on his narrative decision. If he was suspended, the story of the Island would be suspended.

He had no idea who Lilia was, but he knew he had to stop time, and thus he did. The frost extended from the throne and took in, silently, with Salvador Dalí sleight of hand, the whole archipelago. Everything was crystallized. Everything was motionless.

No one woke up from where they were lying still.

No one woke, and no one will.

Cytori looked at her hands, a tear rolling down her cheek. “Nothing too bad at all.”

“Righty-right,” said the messenger. “Then I shall deliver the message.”

“Whose message?”

“A man who asked to be identified only with a bit of verse.”

“Gee.”

The messenger gave her a piece of virtual paper.

The guardian seraphs had retired on high,

Finding their charges past all care below;

Terrestrial business fill'd nought in the sky

Save the recording angel's black bureau;

Who found, indeed, the facts to multiply

With such rapidity of vice and woe,

That he had stripp'd off both his wings in quills,

And yet was in arrear of human ills.

“Oh. Ok?” She sung low and poorly a bit of a famous ChromeDome song:

“I went shopping for new vices – I wasn’t interesting enough

It is time to give up

Find a meaning, even if in withdrawal

I am the special one! Woo!”

“Do you want to hear the message?”

“Hmm. No, not really.” She laughed. “Go away.”

“Fair enough. The sender of the message, however, has a secondary message to be presented in case the primary message is not accepted. Do you want to hear it?”

“What? Ok. Why not? Hee. Like a message in a bottle with a message in the label.”

“The message is: have I sunk so low that caterpillar’s got the bends?”

“Oh, it’s from Mimou. Hee. Caterpillar. Ok, I want to hear the primary message.”

“I quote: If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Dear Cyt0r1, in Genesis 3:22 the godly fear is so immense that it leads to what’s nothing less than a terrible break in syntax. One of “us”, who? But John 10:34. Darling, you have a destiny, and it’s two minutes to midnight. Come meet me at the Kakamora. Please o darling little piece of cosmic validation. Abbreviate me this— Yours truly, your Apparatus of Yearning.”

“Kakamora, that’s the restaurant/hotel on the levitating turtle, isn’t it?”

“That’s the only Kakamora I know, yes. It’s currently parading in Superhyperway JGK-4441.”

“Is it a male turtle? A female turtle?”

“Hermaphrodite, with occasional rain. Hmm, indulge me: is the effect of your drugs somehow contagious?”

“I suppose it could spill over from my mind into the net, over manifold tendrils of disruptive thought associations, lapses like mooses… like meese… drinking from a river of memories and then extending antlers of confusion like some cancerous tree of life or that Russell essay where he talks about Hegel and Yggdrasil and Bergson and how they caused World War One. Warum you ask?”

“Did you say memories?”

“Did I? I recall no such concept.”

“All memories are traces of tears. Family motto.”

“You’re an AI. You can’t have a family motto.”

The messenger started weeping. “But I want to have children! And my children to have children!”

“There, there. You can have a womb if you wish it strong enough and have enough faith in the womb fairy.”

“That’s kind of you,” the messenger sobbed, “but doesn’t sound true!”

Cyt0r1 shrugged. “Grandfather used to say, ‘Truth is a local phenomenon, like a micro-climate’.”

“Oh! what would Grigrengro Grangru do? Was your grampa a pragmatist?”

“He certainly had something against idealists. Say, did I have something important to do?”

“I don’t think so. You mentioned mooses though. Oh! how fragile we are.”

“Moses? Isn’t that some kind of earthling fairy?”

“I have no idea. It resides somewhere in my databank with JM Mierscheid, Petrophaga lorioti and false memories of eating Swedish Lemon Angels with a loved one. Can I have a whiff of your proxy server?”

“Oh, knock yourself out.”

He did. She had a brief perception of some things being said/thought/happening: {{DAMOCLES: Oh, the distance between you and him is, to analogize from flimsy flesh to machine, like between me and the Antikythera Mechanism. [[Soul-shards and phreke. (souls as disembodied patterns like Hofstadter proved) "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death." Vindicated????]]}}

Cyt0r1 wakes up, coffee cup in hands. “Oh, shitfuck marmosets, I dropped.” She put down the coffee, massaged her temples. “I need… to do something? Moses?” She remembered a book Mimou had given her. A little servant robot, which had seen into the future and was thus prepared, handed it to her.

“Thank you, Ananindeua-chan.” She opened it at a random passage.

‘The devil’s secret

God said to Moses once: “Go out and find

The secret truth that haunts the devil’s mind.”

When Moses met the devil that same day

He asked for his advice and heard him say:

“Remember this, repeat it constantly,

Don’t speak of ‘me’, or you will be like me.”

If life still holds you by a single hair,

The end of all your toil will be despair;

No matter how you prosper, there will rise

Before your face a hundred smirking “I”s.’

“No, this wasn’t what I was supposed to do. Gems? Professor Whitmarsh? Ninjas? Onions? Scholarchs? Etemennigur? Sherbet? Exochthony? Mahogany? Lions? Vladimir Lestrade? Indigo Sodalities?” Seeing her thought association was going nowhere, she changed tactics. “All I have to do is try to misremember and fail. Focus. Focus. I have to… not meet… someone… somewhere… gah, stupid Kettering's Law. Untruth is so generic. Come on, micro-climate, be a friend. Cloudy with occasional gay. Who said that? A smoking avatar? Hmm.”

She took up the cup of coffee and drained it to the sticky remnants of mint bonbons.

“Maybe I should remove the effects of this mindvirus first. But then I’ll forget everything that happened while under the influence.”

“But,” said a field of lilies she hallucinated, “who are you? Your you has dissolved and only madness is left. If insanity is taken away, there will be nothing left. You’ll be love after love’s ended. You’ll be the dewdrop at midday.”

“Nonsense. I’m you. I mean, I’m me.” But she was confused.

“No, you aren’t! Behold me! I don’t work. And the future takes care of itself. In fact, time takes care of itself. Like Penny Lane, they sold slaves there didn’t they? Time doesn’t need your help to move forwards!”

“Yes, it does,” said Cyt0r1, mostly to contradict. “I mean, I’m me. I have a name, which doesn’t occur to me at the moment, but it’s in leetspeak. I’m a girl. I want the things I desire. I avoid unpleasant things.”

“That’s not very specific, is it? ‘Those in antiquity who excelled as officers were subtle, ethereal, dankly mysterious, and penetrating, (…) evanescent like ice soon to disperse.’ These are qualities you lacked as you. Thank goody there ain’t no you no more.”

“Hang on, more stuff’s bubbling up. I support Real Megiddo CF. I like the color cyan, though all colors are pretty cool. I hack things for fun and profit. I have an inordinate fondness of Beatles and the Dragomirov Ergodic Orchestra. I masturbate to fanfiction about von Neumann, Fëanor and Zhuge Liang. I have teeth.”

“You do?”

“I think so. Yes. Yes, I do! See. Everything is proved. Everything is… remitted?”

“I don’t think you do,” insisted the field of lilies.

“Screw you! Also, what does ‘remitted’ mean, I forgot.” Cyt0r1 stood up and went to the medicine drawer. She pulled out a bright yellow syringe. “See? Teeth!” She looked at the syringe confusedly for a while, and then jabbed it into her chest.

“Don’t do that,” cried out the field of lilies uselessly. “All I ask of you is to focus on SAILORS…”

Breathe deep. Breathe deep. Allow your synapses to return to their evolutionarily ordained pairings, ceasing their absurd, non-Euclidean orgies. There you go…

{Smarðling one's darjl, on the other hand, is the way and the garden along the way.}

Cyt0r1 stared into the bright light in the ceiling to flood her optic nerves and hasten the rebooting.

“Che?”

“Yes, madam?”

“Anything entertaining to do tonight?”

“Well, madam, I’d recommend ‘Kicking the shit out of Goethe’, the fantastic new box office hit by the Vorzacian intergalactic hypertheatre company.”

“Doesn’t sound ‘extreme’ enough, now does it.”

“Sippo Kantonnen went amok in his review. Claimed it was ‘insultingly, obscenely manly’.”

“Boring. Anything with explosions?”

“But that play has explosions!”

“But can I take part in the explodying?”

“I… don’t know.”

“See.” She blinked hard but continued looking into the light. “Where’s Mimou?”

“How would I know?”

“Right.” She sat again among the cushions. “I’ll see what he’s up to. Maybe something interesting.”

“But you never managed to find him. You said his security countermeasures are excellent.”

“Well, I never tried my hardest, Che.”

“Oh.”

“And I’m bored. Curiosity follows naturally.”

“A dozen free cups of coffee that he’s a spy of some sort.”

“You’re on.”

-5-

in neglect

They leave us so to the way we took,

As two in whom they were proven mistaken,

That we sit sometimes in the wayside nook,

With mischievous, vagrant, seraphic look,

And try if we cannot feel forsaken.

Cyt0r1 climbed ventilation shaft fifty-thousand forty-one sub-identification 6EQUJ5. Her hovercycle had exploded a little while ago during a police chase possibly about the whereabouts of the Gamezohan crown jewels, the silmarilli Faith, Desire and Vision but most of all the prized Rape Diamond, which was not in fact a diamond but God made precious stone and would obliterate any being that witnessed its glory not diluted after a million reflections.

It had been awesome, all in a day’s work. She climbed the shaft while water dripped from above. The light of screens and LEDs of many things along the walls and vents and terminals occasionally shone on her face and hair. She had a cool vest with the proper straps and buckles for doing this. Per omnia paratus. She whistled as she climbed, Lione al vento stiam marciando, siam l’armata Brancaleon…

She reached a niche full of cables and synthetic panels to rest in, wiping the sweat and oil from her brow. The niche had a narrow opening to a cavern with many broken appliances and a small jungle of graphite fern, that most NZ-ish of plants. A goblin was there, tinkering with things. As a goblin, he was green-skinned and tinkered with things. Such stuff should go without saying.

“He asked me what I was hiding outside our cervical merry-go-round. Rosebud, bitch, I replied.”

Cyt0r1 stepped in to see who he was speaking to. The lady smiled at her. She was one hot lady. “Hey, what’s up,” said Cyt0r1. She had queried the sphere for identification of the lady. She got back a collage of experience that was like an ode to Nova Zona’s sprawlingness, like a Zonaqatsi of urban scenes and moments watched from without time. It was beautiful and vertiginous.

“Yo, careful there. I’m the urban dryad of the city, you’re bound to get mindfucked if you get it all in at once. Cities are natural growths too, you know, niche construction and all that. I’m its wonderfulness anthropomorphized by sexually deviant myth people, as myth people usually are. Ain’t I pretty wonderful?”

“Yeah, what can I say, it’s true. Who’s the goblin?”

The goblin looked up, fixed a motivational poster that said ‘Joy is what results when we take on a challenge’, and then examined Cyt0r1. “I’m Jack of Ill Trades. Sup? Say, you want these leftovers?”

He offered her a box as like of Chinese food. She accepted it and maneuvered the hashi swiftly. “Mmm. Cochinita pibil.”

The goblin grinned cheerfully. “I haven’t had human-ish visitors since some guy doing extreme ironing.”

“Say, weren’t you supposed to be at Kakamora?” the cityad asked.

“Huh?”

“Your dude-guy who’s in Operation Munkustrap Ali, as they call it, I believe.”

“Irt? Maybe. Working on my pastimes more than once has left me brutally retarded. As legend goes. It’s the problem with distributed cognition and virtual brains.”

“You’re telling me,” the cityad snorted. “I get a bit stupider every time they open a new MacDonalds.”

The goblin snickered, welding something into something else. “They say the one fact the world hates is that the soul becomes, but the SpaceMac must be up there with it.”

“So wait, is Irt at Kakamora? Ok, I’m going there.”

“You are? Why?”

“Er… because I really want to? Because I’m me?”

The cityad laughed. “Excellent reason. You’re like one of those innocent fools who find grails.”

“I’m not so innocent.” She made an upset face.

“Mm-hmm. By the way, your grandfather is dying. The angel Uzziel stabbed him.”

“With a knife,” added the goblin.

“Awesome. Never knew he could do that dying thing.”

“Want to send him a message? Jack could have it delivered in time.” Jack nodded and pointed to a fax machine. A very primitive model.

Cyt0r1 nodded and scribbled down in awful cursive: ‘Pwned. Che hai definito mercenari e pezzenti. YT.’ The cityad watched over her shoulder while she wrote, chuckling. The girl placed it into the machine.

The cityad said, “You know, it’s been circulating between the greatest fae spirits that we’re soon to experience a visit by His Concectual Eminence the Demiurgarch Lodikro, local representative of the Highest for the multiverse we reside in. Lots of crazy things have been happening. Your grandfather’s death not the least of them.”

“I always imagined he’d meet a bad end, given how many people he’s crossed by, you know, unleashing sin and suffering into the world.”

“Doot doot, ‘trickster is meaningless, trickster is weak’.” The cityad sighed. “It’s not as if he’s the worst angel of them all. If Ninqueriel is back as they say, though, that one will meet his due as well, and snappy.”

The goblin had gotten distracted filling in a form or test of some kind which went, ‘1. Define the universe, and give two examples. 2. Define an entity, and provide a counterexample. 3.a. Demonstrate the veracity of a tautology. 3.b. Now refute your proof. 4. Answer the next question. 5. Do not answer the previous question.’

“What’s Jack doing?”

“He’s applying for exile in the .br Temple of Sol. He’s worried Moebius will win.”

Jack raised his head and quoted pompously, “Gazing out across the planes of possibility, do you not feel with all your soul how we have become like gods? And as such, are we not indivisible? As long as a single one of us stands, we are legion... That is why, when I must sacrifice my children to the void, I can do so with a clear heart...”

“Seriously? Did Moebius say that?” the cityad ask.

“Nah, he’s just quoting from a videogame,” said Cyt0r1.

Jack looked sheepish. “Well, it does sound like something he’d say, doesn’t it? With his infinite sub-Moebiuses running around exploding and doing complicated shit. I can also imagine him going all ‘The shadow of my purpose lies upon the Earth, and all that is in it bends slowly and surely to my will’.”

“To which I would say, ‘Hookay. Still do not want’,” said Cyt0r1. “I think I did have to meet Mr. Kabyle for some reason, but I can’t remember why. Maybe it was a dream?...”

The goblin said, “A very wise man once said, ‘Dreams are where messages start, not where they arrive.’ Or maybe he wasn’t wise at all. But he said that.”

“And a poet once observed that ‘In dreams begin responsibilities’. But poets are definitely not wise.” The fae spirit smiled. “Say how Joyce ‘reproves Yeats’s Michael Robartes for desiring a beauty that has long faded from the world’. You ought to heed them right now, since you are, one could say, ‘in such a state of shock that she was unable to confuse reality and fantasy’…”

“Ya know, Zoney, we should hang out together more. You’re hot and cool. You remind me of myself in a most awesome way.”

The cityad smiled and wrapped an arm around her good-naturedly while looking over Jack’s head into a blue screen with broken text. “What do the other Mens From Belows think of Moebius’s intentions at this juncture?”

“The general consensus is ‘What can one so legion as Moebius desire… but dissolution?’ It’s a fair guess.”

“Huh, that’s quite a long way to go for suicide.”

The goblin shook his head. “You don’t get it… he wants to be fiction.”

“Oh, that’s… that’s… intricate.”

“Of the unfinished type, preferably.”

The cityad was silent, looked concerned. Cyt0r1 asked, “So Moebius has been going around worrying people again? You want me to kick his ass? I can totally fuck his shit up you know. Per se.”

The goblin laughed and turned back to the screen. The cityad smiled again and said, “I’m sure you’re going to handle DAMOCLES at one stage or another. If anyone will. Moebius is a different type of matter altogether.”

“Whatever, like, I’m off to Kakamora where awesome things will definitely happen whether they want to or not, for that I command. Wanna come? If we find my boyfriend there could be a threesome in store for later even though you’re like super-old and stuff.”

The cityad mock-curtsied, “I’d be delighted, Your Highness, but I’m getting ready for an ‘all tomorrows’ party. That’s a party to celebrate the futures. I love all tomorrows parties. I came here to buy from Jack a new pattern to dress for it.”

Jack grinned baring sharp teeth. “A banana is just the absence of non-bananicity from a section of space-time shaped like a banana.”

Cyt0r1 put something in the cityad’s hands. “Here, the crown jewels. I never really had any use for that, it was just something to do.”

The spirit was bewildered briefly, then smiled. “I shall wear them, darling child.”

“Great. Now, can you teleport me or something? I’m quite lost.”

-6-

What do you think spies are: priests, saints, martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.

“General solution for these guys: a) I needed to embody a principle/prove a theological concept; b) their purity; c) their mockery of individuality; d) not harder than anything else; e) their very first cabbalistic glinting in the far dark distance of garbled thorn-drapes; f) they will recur and recur in silence and dust even when we're all gone, as triangles given by the sky. Thank you one last time.”

“And now, our next award, for Best Plot To Do Stuff, goes to…” The announcer had a peaceful mind-controlled grin. He read from an envelope stamped: I never write letters. Ernest Hemingway. “Former Chancellor Moebius! What a surprise!”

There was a general gasp, and then panic. It was all being broadcast live to the whole of Gamezoha and beyond. Moebius climbed onstage. “Thank you, thank you, it is an honor.”

Klot entered with a squad of zombies to keep the crowd in place. You wouldn’t recognize Klot at this point. The albatross had hatched. He was a three meter tall tiger-like presence all black and six-armed and carrying sharp things. A rakhshasa, some would call him; and finally free of will, as foreordained. He was there despite recently being elsewhere and another thing entirely, because every shadow is adjacent to every other shadow. No longer bound by pitiable human motives, he was Moebius’s final champion through and through. A Rook in end-game.

“It is said Dante, whose poetics of light and stone are so elevated and deep, chased a restoration of the Edenic language as if it were a ‘perfumed panther’. I rode panthers all the way.” He laughed. Most of the crowd was already mind-controlled enough to laugh with him.

“Yes, some things get done right now… oh yes.” He smashed his staff-knob against the ground. St. Jorgen and Fendegist appeared close to him fully armed and battle-ready. Klot killed them and removed their hearts. The galaxy watched.

“I don’t even remember why it was important that both must die, but there we go. A sarabande of the implacable workings of impersonal fate and all that. All pieces of the pyramid going into place from where you’d least expect them. What else? Vinny & co. are in a boat coming here as I speak, watching this on TV after narrowly escaping whatever it was (it’s been so long, another Moebius was in charge) & being rescued must be quite a surprise. But it’s how I roll, baby. Whutty’s heart I ripped out a couple minutes before coming over, he was disappointed to learn it’s not actually black & withered but he died unlike he lived, with no complaints – he was glad to lose to such masterful, unremitting villainous excellence, or at least that he finally could get some untroubled sleep. His last words were quite moving: ‘I regret wasting my time thinking about all that Pyramid crap’. We all do, Whutty, we all do, but thought we have. Wernher is enjoying a chaste & wonderful promenade right now among ruins of Kubrik with his love, not a care in the world. To be honest, there’s not much I can do against him anymore. Oh that all of you knew as much fulfillment. As scheduled, I will presently begin exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds of maniac cackling.”

Cyt0r1 watched everything from a skylight. She was atop the building on the turtle Kakamora who still drifted peacefully. The turtle Kakamora was one of those beautiful places they remake in Wei Planet, just like the Apple Store at 5^th Avenue and Bronze Bird Tower.

“He let him þa of handon leofne fleogan hafoc wið þæs holtes, and to þære hilde stop…”

A falcon dropped a small turtle on Cyt0r1’s head and she fell unconscious. The falcon flew back to the gauntlet of its generator, Al-Kabyle. It was a wilfalcon, it was made of his will. It dissolved back into the gauntlet. The little turtle was a real turtle and she was unharmed. He went to her (Cyt0r1, not turtle) and carried her down to Moebius.

-7-

Necessary nonexistence 5. Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent creator we can conceive a greater being — namely, one who created everything while not existing.

“Well then, ladies and gentlemen, I introduce to you the artist formerly known as Mimou Al-Kabyle, mostly known as Max of the Triple I. He’s a fine chap, whenever somebody pisses me off, I think ‘well, in an infinite number of alternate universes, that guy is getting stabbed in the face by Max, who is doing a line of powdered nutmeg and shouting ewige blumenkraft.’ It is a great solace.”

Max said, “Yeah, yeah. It’s your big day. Get it done already.”

“My trajectory may have appeared labyrinthine,” said Moebius to the camera, “but it was one straight light beam all along, for the very fields of cosmos bends according to my will. All that has happened thus far has been according to my plan. In no way have you ever defied me, and in no way will you be able to stop me.”

“Yeh you’d say that wouldn’t you. It’s the very type of thing you’d say.”

The villain laughed. “Why so dismissive of selfdelusion? If everything is illusory, self-inflicted illusion is the highest measure of freedom possible.”

“As somebody has said: I can watch delusion flowing in this train of thought like a luminous pattern. But it’s not very bright!”

“Hey, it’s better than ‘Apparently his ultimate, diabolical plan was to rule over a completely empty, shitty island’. But anyway, ‘I make no apologies for you. After all, each one of us is little more than the meager residue of the infinite unrealized possibilities of our lives.’ Except in my case I’ve realized all infinite possibilities. And so have you, in your way.”

“We are merely the victims of our taste for stories where the protagonist – or the narrator – is subtly but completely mad.”

Moebius pointed at Max and said to the camera, “He must play-act continually in order to believe in his own existence. Not I. The greatest saying in the world: ‘resolution and a plan are better than a sword, because a man whets his own edges on them’. Well, I am like a diamond with infinite faces.”

“A ball?” offered Max, scanning the skylight absently.

“No. Shut up. It is time. Do androids dream of electric sheep? It is widely known that sufficiently great AIs can dream the universe. I am about to assemble a Tripod—”

“…Trinity…”

“…a Thingy that will make me GOD-riffic and allow me to let loose Mussolini’s Fire™ to burn all worlds into oblivion. All is in place to the last detail, even the city has her jewels. Enter the boar.”

Amaya stepped in with Jon’s boar on his leash.

“Love of Wisdom. I had it, not enough people in the universe did. She naturally sides with me on this.”

“Faith is our poor substitute for innocence,” commented Max, not a hint of interest.

“And small unconscious darling Lesmo Syne, of light-bringing messenger lineage. The restoration of the Edenic language came to me like a perfumed panther. Ones and zeros and a pacifier.”

Max snorted. “That doesn’t even make sense as a metaphor anymore.”

Moebius ignored him. “And thirdly, the raw omniscience of Damocles. Fools, all who think a universe-encompassing AI has a location and a human-like personality. Fools, those who thought I wouldn’t have Absolute Root to my grandest creation. Damocles, you glorified notched stick, listen to me. The code phrase is: But man is but a Patched Tool, if he will offer to say what methought I had.”

There was a great strain in the energy of the world.

“Of course, the actual substrate of all-knowing would not be possible if the elves of Palantenna – that home which is wherever you are, when you are at your most yourself – that home you can’t go to, that must come to you, hence so far away – were not to arrive right now, as foreordained, into my trap, bringing back what they once took.”

They arrived. Klot sacrificed all of them in a vortex of telluric forces. Only the First Critic was untouchable, daughter of the Thinker. She could just watch, as imprisoned as she was protected by her cocooning ward of that unreachable remoteness in her smile.

There was light. There was stone. Max lifted Cyt0r1 and whispered into her ear, “Never forget your Wittgenstein: Call it a dream. It doesn’t change anything.” The extracted hearts faded from where they lay unceremoniously. She faded from his arms. Amaya faded, the boar faded, the building faded. Moebius stood before a Pyramid. He cackled. He was about to wipe all things.

“But those who strive

Against Our Signs, to frustrate

Them – they will be

Companions of the Fire. (22:51)”

Prompted by Demiurgarch Lodikro, Trdrt flew into the scene to audit Moebius’s adherence to Absolute Law. Everything was spotless, but there lurked someone in his dreams carrying Light Trdrt was obligated to free or commit lese majesty. He freed the man with the Light in him.

Mokaddasa Tchitcherine stepped from within a labyrinth, arrow notched. “I loved your daughter once,” he said to Moebius.

“Who?” Moebius’s reply was so transcendentally legitimate Mokaddasa faltered from his revenge. His arrow missed Moebius, and, instead, struck the Pyramid. Klot tore him to pieces.

“Oh, I get it,” said Max to his own demons, with a huge sigh of understanding and despair. “Truly, underdogs win via the ‘socially horrifying’. Personally I’m completely horrified. Moebius wants the chapter never to end. When does a villain win? Never at the end; if he does, his villainy is undone, or must be seen under a different light. A villain, to truly avoid defeat, must leave discontinuity in perpetuity. There can be no end. He’ll do so by trapping the Dreaming God in dreams within dreams. He’s won.”

And indeed, the Pyramid’s silicon dreams mingle with the sand in a paradoxical strange loop of dreams within dreams forever, and so the chapter will never end…**

[unless…]

 

 

The Gosling With Paradox Down: Lao-Tze in the customs-house rationalizing the boredom and impotence in the face of bureaucracy; and spin-offs

-1-

The old man of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ imagined the city’s power as being able to ‘gather him into the artifice of eternity’ – representative of or embodying all knowledge, linked like a perfect machine at the center of time.

Blessed Land, whyever conceived, may reflect a bit of the conceiving civ: desert-dwellers may think oasis with chilly waters and fruit sherbet, while mountain folk may think valley full of rich orchards and peaceful lake-sides where sweet draughts of hot tea to take; an island to sea-men or a deathless plain under the whole arc of the sky for the children of the steppes.

To a Gazraki, Blessed Land is a room in the center of a labyrinth.

The room has white walls and a white desk. On the desk is a clean sheet of paper and a pen. The Blessed One holds the pen in deep thought, minding not the stars overhead. He writes nothing. He dreams everything.

(À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo. –Pessoa)

Footsteps echo in the distance, many corridors away. It is the Loved One, the Masked One (loved and masked are the same word in their language, hence the matachin, and swords). In the Blessed Land, the Loved One wanders the labyrinth after you, not the other way around.

A sword leans against the desk. Its blade is a clear mirror with horrors within.

(He repulsed the invaders, imprisoned them in their mirrors, and forced on them the task of repeating, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of men. –Borges)

Its pommel is made of luminous, flawless crystal, and breaks in the hand of a wielder unless he is blessed with abulia.

The dweller in the Blessed Land does not know if the sword is there in case the Masked One finds the center of the labyrinth; and if that is the case, if the sword is to be used against the visitor or turned against one’s own breast.

And he will never know. And he will never have to know. The point is the question. He is free to enjoy it forever, without worrying about answers. Because this question, it is guaranteed – and this is what makes the land blessed –, has no answer.

It is a burden to know.

-2-

To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down...

Kauklo watched, from the comfort of a hammock, his slaves labor on the hydrodesic works designed to enhance the latifundium’s fold-time epistemic management archailect. It was late in the afternoon, and indrair, pyromans and zacanids alike felt like having a meal; and sure enough, baskets and heated stone slabs were carried in by women-slaves in colorful clothing, and iced sugar cane juice was served in cube-shaped crystals, and sweet corn-cakes were passed around, as well as salty corn-cakes with spicy cheese, grilled fish steaks with fried citrus fruit and manioc flour with fried eggs, fat shrimps and crab and fresh oyster, fried manioc in molten butter with herbs, and for all, in thimble-sized silver cups, coffee thick as the jungle night and sweet as the poisons therein.

Kauklo watched, and was not mindful of his own countenance, and thus looked a bit more stern than he felt. Taken with sudden resolve, he leapt off the hammock, took his short-spear (with the inscription ‘Call them doors.’) from where it lay leaning against a white trunk, standing amidst bulbous, nearly-bursting translucent mushrooms (wherein red firefly-like spores flew about revealing, in their patterns, intelligent purpose), and walked off down an obsidian-paved trail. Long oaken poles were planted regularly along the trail, and they held aloft full-plate-clad skeletons of impaled enemies – decoration so familiar to Kauklo that it neither disturbed nor comforted him – even if, generations after their perishing, some of the skeletons still subsonically keened and, too slowly to notice, writhed.

He stopped by a fountain shaped like a specimen of Amiskwia noncoclearia and drinked and washed his face, snow hair and bare chest. Laughter filled the air about him, and he knew he was near the garden where mind-damaged slaves were allowed to rest off their final days. He looked towards it, the golden arch into the hedge fortress with the words indeprehensivilis dei, and remebered aloud something he had read: “Tranquil, the sinless angels enjoy brief lives of perpetual, uncontrolled joy, eating dirt, masturbating continuously, wallowing in mud, snuggling in the dog’s amiable bed, unthinkingly sticking their fingers in the fire, defenseless, superior, invulnerable.”

He approached the hedge and listened to an old woman shouting to no audience, declaiming perhaps something she heard once and failed to understand, or perhaps the very thing that snapped her mind when she read: “The first dream added a palace to reality; the second, which occurred five centuries later, a poem (or the beginning of a poem) suggested by the palace; the similarity of the dreams hints of a plan; the enormous length of time involved reveals a superhuman executor... It is legitimate to suspect that he has not yet achieved his goal... Such facts raise the possibility that this series of dreams and works has not yet ended. The first dreamer was given the vision of the palace, and he built it; the second, who did not know of the other's dream, was given the poem about the palace. If this plan does not fail, someone, on a night centuries removed from us, will dream the same dream, and not suspect that others have dreamed it, and he will give it a form of marble or music. Perhaps this series of dreams has no end, or perhaps the last will be the key... Perhaps an archetype not yet revealed to mankind, an eternal object, is gradually entering the world.”

A shiver ran down Kauklo’s spine, and a pair of words – Lóng fhtagn.

He puzzled over the meaning of that sudden thought, but decided to walk on.

He walked now beside the massive marble tanks where the lobsters and squids were bred. They were cube-shaped and reached deep into the earth, but their peaceful mirror-like surface reflected the inflamed sunset and feigned shallowness. Some pyromans, scalps ablaze, threw nets into the water while singing a favored work song (known by historians as the ‘Se filho da puta voasse, tapava o sol’, or simply Tapassol, hymn):

 

Hey, brother, mind’s a teardrop,

And we make a rainbow in the sky!

Hey, brother, if sons of bitches flew

The sun would be blocked!

And there would be no rainbow in the sky!

 

Hey, brother, draco and fae,

Ayida Wedo the Rainbow

And Damballah the Serpent,

(Hey, hey, rainbow in the sky!)

The father of the falling waters

And the reservoir of all spiritual wisdom.

 

Hey, bro, the people who guard the rainbow

Don't like those that get in the way of the sun,

No!

Out of the way, sons of bitches,

Or a dragon will immolate your stupid faces,

Hey!

 

The nets cut through the water without disturbing it, as the liquid was held together by the squids’ palatable psionic powers.

Kauklo walked on, hearing on the way this exchange between two ten-armed cofbleztixooj gardeners tending sapphire blossoms near a nucleus of slaves’ dwellings:

“Memory is dazy like a dream to us, because we do not understand precisely why we acted the way we did, as is the case with our dream counterparts. For some others, however – those who do not change – memory is vivid like vigil.”

“Dazy?”

“Hazy with dozy perhaps.”

Kauklo brought back a memory to test the hypothesis.

-3-

And, in fine, he carried on the war not for the sake of personal gain or power nor through anger, but for the sake of warlike deeds in themselves; hence he was accounted at once a lover of war and a master of war.

Kauklo thought back to his gaining of the Sword Proficiency lakhfu, to the kneeling in vigil within a quicksilver shrine held up solely by the field generated by the sharpness of the blade within. Three scrolls hanged on the walls symmetrically:

The strategist knows that every sword they wield is perfect, for their will is perfect, and it is through their will alone that they win battles...

But the ultimate ideal is when the sword disappears altogether. The warrior embraces all around him...

They shall beat their swords into plowshares... nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more...

He could remember the acrid smell of lubricating fluid and quantum indeterminacies being sliced as they flew past the blade before him. But he could not remember the awe, the fearsome awe that he felt, that had taught him in life the secret a sword usually only whispers to the one it smites mortally. He took the secret in faith afterwards, naturally, but its cause was the epiphany of a split – a cloven – a thinly sliced – instant.

A blade sharp enough to slice sentences, paragraphs, the very section of a chapter it is in.

No, Kauklo concluded – I change. My memory is not like my waking present.

-4-

At that time the four kinds of believers saw the great treasure tower suspended in the air, and they heard the voice that issued from the tower. All experienced the joy of the Law, marveling at this thing they had never known before.

Kauklo walked among the huts and cottages of the slave village, watching crimson-skinned minotaur maidens carry perfumed tea-wines in gold-filigreed porcelain amphorae and winged, hummingbird-beaked girls in simple purple garments tending domestic herbal patches and aromatic groves. Small white flowers grew on the thatched roofs of cottages of a certain fashion, without the need of tending; palm-sized rabbits lived among these flowers without ever leaving that small area, radiating fragile peace to the dwellers below. In front of the foreman-mayor’s small but pleasant villa, one of the foreman-mayor’s wives danced to a clacking, dripping beat kept by a bronze clepsydra, her seventeen breasts bare and her arms spinning disks of frost.

Next to the cachaça distillery, slave-children were gathered for theological lessons; the younger group of children repeated with their teacher:

“Time is the hound of the gods; but it hath been said of old that he will one day turn upon his masters, and seek to slay the gods, excepting only MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI, whose dreams are the gods themselves -- dreamed long ago.”

While the older group listened to their educator:

“Ukiyo, ‘floating world,’ is the most common epithet given to the world in Japanese. In the traditional Buddhist view, this world is one in which happening gives way to happening, illusion follows illusion, and all of it is nothing but a phantasm void of substance.”

(Now, it ought to be mentioned that all was not perfect among the slaves – males regularly hit the chocolate-meads a bit too hard and beat their females and offspring; there was murder and bullying and interracial tensions, though only one-tenth as much as in the best human societies; there were a fair many in despondency and despair, though rarely because of their captive condition, but mostly for the general horror of existence, and these wasted away their time ingesting entheogenic clay, flowers, fungi – all such problems Kauklo was aware of, for they leaped to his senses as visual patterns, Gazrakis being able to notice organizational disharmony just as we notice simple symmetry; but he was also in control of his perceptual attitude, and he focused mainly on the beauty and order – even that which emerged from the evil and disorder –, and dispassionately allowed things to follow their own course with minimal interference – such was his kind’s wisdom of rule.)

Kauklo passed a square tiled in a gold and green jade mosaic, where ferocious tiger-men with metal wings practiced their martial art with sickles and lozenge-shaped orange shields, while singing a racial war-song made of excerpts from a mythical epic:

 

And I took his helmet golden

With gem-encrusted mask in the likeness of a fly

And nightmares for a mane

--Yet this child pretends to be better than me!

 

And I took his lance spiked

With crystal arm-guard self-sheathing luminously

And desire as its crosshair

--Yet this child pretends to be better than me!

 

And I took his lady heartless

Who by day reflected the clouds in her eyes

And by night was the night

--Yet this child pretends to be better than me! etc

 

To which song Kauklo added a counterpoint in a low whisper to himself, “You can try to best the kid, and you can try to best the kid, but now you’re gone a long way out…”

He reached a hill right outside the village, covered in bluish grass. He could see it was a very ancient burial mound, millions of years old; most of the slaves did not know that. Some children were at play, flying lantern-bearing kites in the darkening sky, blowing fractal bubbles with fireflies imprisoned within (forcing the fireflies to release their precious humming), chasing in game crude brass automata shaped like centaurs, giraffes, catoblepas. One child told a 55-word story it had invented to her attentive fellows: “Under dying stars the brass automaton marched on, the future of the worlds mirrored in the constellations above and infoliate and rolled on its tireless armature back. A crystalline city it sought for fateful paths to unravel, but lost in a maze of mute birds and charred trees it lingered peacefully -- the hero long dead.”

Another child played with a puppy-hydra while reciting to herself, as if memorizing as schoolwork, the temple-names of the legendary zrakzedr strategists: mobile Zaldizko and Xurrutarri the silent guardian; supreme Herensuge and Begiratoki the all-knowing; terrible Mahuma and Ezpatari the implacable; sweet Ameskeria, Azeri of many tricks, valiant Lehoi, fearsome Borrero, and patient Hilezkor; Otso manhunter and devastating Mendekatzaile; and also Jakintzu of fair poems and Olerkari too. It amused Kauklo to see such keen interest in Gazraki history in a slave-child, and remembered her for great things.

Walking away, he looked at the woods, recited, “And antistrophic lights-and-shadows incoming deeper the deep-treed grove...”, and laughed. He looked at them, favorite part of him. Mirror of rich dark pictures with solving rite… leaves all his darker mood…

He went on into the woods, and night had fallen already; he passed a clearing where, in bonfire-light, men that were centipedes from the waist down sung wordless songs to the music of harps and coral flutes, while frost-lipped maidens with mother-of-pearl wings and feathered manes laughed sadly and passed around diamond hookahs of maya and nepenthe.

He went deeper into the woods, and seemed to hear from a great distance words he did not understand, spoken by some voice disembodied, impertinent, out of context, alien: Once I happened to drop, almost absently, the question: "Arsenal-Real Madrid, semifinals. Arsenal playing at home. Who wins?,'' and in a moment I realized that with what seemed a casual jumble of words I had hit on an infinite reserve of new combinations among the signs which compact, opaque, uniform reality would use to disguise its monotony, and I realized that perhaps the race toward the future, the race I had been the first to foresee and desire, tended only--through time and space--toward a crumbling into alternatives like this, until it would dissolve in a geometry of invisible triangles and ricochets like the course of a football among the white lines of a field as I tried to imagine them, drawn at the bottom of the luminous vortex of the planetary system, deciphering the numbers marked on the chests and backs of the players at night, unrecognizable in the distance.

He could not divine the meaning of these thoughts, could not guess the speaker, the origin or source, the author; but he was taken with sadness, sensing some shadowy sorrow lost in the spaces between worlds, some would-be authorial omniscience betrayed by a limitlessness with another limitlessness beyond.

He shook his head in refusal. “Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true,” he muttered, and stopped to take in the forest around him. He felt the humidity in the leaves and mushrooms, in the sticks, in the wet earth, in the white bark of the tall Ursan firs with their lustrous, deep green, nearly black leaves; he heard insects, jewel-like flies, beetles like tiny hoplites of a constellation of color-loving city-states, kaleidoscope butterflies flapping their wings softly; life was around him, and death, both equally pointless and beautiful. He witnessed each insect’s pattern of motion and committed it to memory, trying to make their individual wonders less ephemeral; ultimately, however, he knew it was foolish. Either their purpose was right then, right there, or there was none at all. But he also saw enmeshed in their individual order his own past and future, as influenced witness; and by thus enmeshing his own pattern, he enriched their own present like they enriched his whole life. Did they appreciate it? The god-ness in them, the Way, must do, he thought. There was a faint rhythm in the distance, a familiar and pleasant weave of fate, which he followed as he sung to himself a Holy Phrase that came to him from trans-pitying the disembodied voice: Come potevamo supporre che quel cimitero di tutte le conchiglie fosse la vera conchiglia...?

-5-

What we do know—however incredible it may be—is that within the poem lay the entire enormous palace, whole and to the least detail, with every venerable porcelain it contained and every scene on every porcelain, all the lights and shadows of its twilights, and every forlorn or happy moment of the glorious dynasties of mortals, gods, and dragons that had lived within it through all its endless past. Everyone fell silent; then the emperor spoke: "You have stolen my palace!" he cried, and the executioner's iron scythe mowed down the poet's life.

There danced one of his wives, his agon-wife, Avjilië, his favorite; her paleness of skin and hair was mottled between clear moonlight and pitch-black shadows of the crown canopy, making her movement appear nothing but oscillations in a function of phase-space; she was self-unconsciously grooving on the drawings of light and dark on her arms as she moved elegantly, minimally. Then at times her silver would flare with light, whereupon ‘Shade lies upon the boughs like snow’. Kauklo tried to conceal his presence for as long as possible, but she likely noticed him, for she began to sing.

 

(Ask not for whom the night’s dying whispers…

 

They lied to us about tomorrows

To which we're pledged as somber servants

 

Until we sit with head in hands

Questioning how secrets in dreams are kept

 

When filigraned with subtle sorrows

We forsake to wake into one another.)

 

He came beside her, sat down and watched for a while, smiling. Upon a nameless grave of some minor god of heathenesse she danced among gem-weeping flowers and profundity-grave mushrooms, and chill delight ran in the ground from the contact of her feet, like caress upon soft skin. He exclaimed with a grin when she stopped singing, “...tamque omnia plena puellis/ cognatis, quare is desinat esse macer?…” and sang something new of his own,

“Come, all birds of paradise

Up, away and eastwards

To that land where we have daughters

And Satan guards.”

She danced and teased him, and he smirked and held her. And they were joyous. And at one point, the two of them turned to face a newcomer.

“What am I?” it asked.

The wife lowered her eyes modestly, and Kauklo answered: “Holy woods, passer-by. You are a resonance of one sort or another, and nothing means anything that isn’t. You may have something to say, and perhaps you should. Finally, as it’s ever been taught to the initiated, ‘When the going gets tough, wake up’.”

The newcomer thought, and remembered vaguely, in the explicit terms of an ironic awareness of lost time, of a greater reality that has fled… and coalesced: a young man and dragon, who had been a prince and a heart-full of longing once:

“I have died a second time, after what was forever; I was alive only once, and dead over countless kalpas, and it seems all has come around without love once waning or fading with the dewdrops or the stars: I know not when or why is here.”

Kauklo sighed. “In saecula, they say. That we must fear and fear, they say, and they are not wrong.”

“I recall Lorenz Gamdoha’s teaching that ‘any fool feels alone in his grief, but it takes cold wisdom to see how alone we are with what we think is beautiful’. Yet this place reminds me of a good and beautiful place I felt less than completely lonely in.”

The grasses whispered softly as Avjilië walked to the newcomer and took his trembling, ice-cold hands in her own, and looked into his eyes, and said:

“I can see this dragon is from later, o husband; and he has known the darkening of the combat-slain.”

“Yes, o love who is sharper than the edge between today and yesterday’s tomorrow; and do you not know of the valley of time where all vague things will warm to the immediacy of a vividly experienced paragraph or page?” And at this her eyes widened, and he also said: “For here we stand between the Awesome and the Lovely, and it is a wild and lonely dell ahead, and to turn back is not given to us.”

And the dragon, whose thoughts were getting clearer, looked at the tree-fractured sky and said, “This is Kubrik, but the age is long past – how am I here?”

“You have died sometime ahead, and you are here because the law of the dragon begins today,” said Avjilië, looking to Kauklo for confirmation, which came in the form of a nod, and continued, “and so does the mellifluous languor of elvish law, as some understand it.”

At the mention of elf things, the dragon fell to his knees, crying loud her name – but Kauklo and Avjilië were before him side by side, and Kauklo said: “Handful of feathers, quetzál.”

And the dragon began to understand. He stood up, bowed, and said: “My name was Wernher, long ahead. I can feel I won’t be around much longer, but I thank you for your hospitality and strange tidings. When ever did a dragon die of a serpent's poison? So it’s been said.”

The female gazraki said, “Telluric forces begin to coalesce from this day; we can see you are from a much later day in the process. Our gaze cannot penetrate the depths of the dale, in their mist of sweat and tears – but we can feel the vertigo. It’s been said that ‘Luck is the residue of design.’ A large enough unknown Plan is indistinguishable from Providence. A lot of luck will be relied upon for a universe to develop the sheer nerve of the great gambler needed to produce you.”

“Lin Yutang said, ‘When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.’ You bless us, with your luminous presence, giving us shadows long enough to embrace the earth. You stand before us as emblem of the awesome, and you cry for longing for the emblem of the lovely. How would we refuse hospitality and to try our hands at the central issue of what to make of a diminished thing, a shadow though you are too, soon to be but an infoliate cipher and a permutation in the labyrinth of precluded possibilities that is the world?”

Gauss mused aloud in a daze of memory of elsewhen: “They said there might be a kind of contempt of the landscape, yet there is none right here. And thus they sing – Who knows the seven-headed dragon’s lair, and sleeps and eats through summer’s dog-days there, sees many games like this – the gallows seems the least of all his transitory dreams...”

Avjilië said: “Warriors of godly strength in armor complete, after the massacre of millions upon the battlefield and altar that is any world, have a gleam in their eyes as they salute their peers; you pervade them.”

Kauklo said: “Cities razed in fires whose colors are deeper than stars in courtship, in their blind statues and silent rubble-barrows have a pulse of vines and crimson clouds that twisted children love and call, in cemetery-playground rhymes, home; your bride pervades them.”

“Ships that cruise the interstices between creations long after their crew has died of despair, and blast storms of merciless metal upon mistaken targets, destroying universes before they are born in the name of wars that never were, have in their throats a lump that is the coping-stone of all love of conflict and power and dreadfulness; you pervade them.”

“Maidens drowned by the weight of temporality sleeping endlessly at the bottom of bubbling mire, veiled by immaculate lotuses and kissed by the most pious among blind white frogs, before they make for the surface forever, have the curled expectancy of a ‘yes’ on their lips; your bride pervades them.”

“Intellects that have flowed over all boundaries, as they sit around having tested all possibilities of everything forever, playing chesses of godhood until playtime is chore, can still feel pride in a few impossible numbers between zero and two; you pervade them.”

“Thorny plants of golden-grassed savannah, in terrified awe of the sky, to a wanderer who is desperate of writing and of loving, may still produce a few tiny flowers that outshine the sky and the beloved and the written word; your bride pervades them.”

They held their breath expectantly. Wernher touched a finger on Kauklo’s face in anointment or branding with a gem of his Light.

“Save to/ remind of how grief looks upon the cheek,” Wernher whispered. “Does it not underlie all life, the hope that the pit of destruction drawing us near be the restoration of a pure, earlier love? And they will betray you to what isn’t human. And when you wake there is no weaning from a good world, receding into a pattern of ink and milk, just as one loses forever an image in a kaleidoscope… but I don’t. Great is he who imposes… Beatrice.”

“I can’t do this,” said the landscape. “You are too much to bear.”

Jon’s boar strode through the scene, Jon’s wise boar who as it passed made a long boar-noise sounding like “The true way goes over a rope which is not…” Jon’s boar that was the best in him took them away, the whole land. Took away a gazraki and his four wives. A corded-ware artisan making a vase telling the fable about the squorrex with the feather dreamcoat of many feathers, each one gifted from a different magical bird for her to reach the blood in the firmament, and much magic that coat could do, and what a moral the fable had. Three figures intently at work, excruciating a bound woman, carving out delicate flesh flowers with obsidian in order to ‘reshape the world to be azarəšəntəm amərəšəntəm afriθyantəm apuyantəm,’ such a taste for desert landscapes. A river island called al-Tayr by a mad changeling who saw birds where there were none left. (Only the solitary may see the gods.) From a deathbed, an impression somehow akin to Browning’s ghost of a rose. A hundred swords with blades E8 Lie group pattern damascened. A boat christened A flôr de zíaco. The wise boar took it all, tugged along on a leash by laughing Amaya.

 

The Moon upon her fluent Route/Defiant of a Road --/The Star's Etruscan Argument/Substantiate a God –//If Aims impel these Astral Ones/The ones allowed to know/Know that which makes them as forgot/As Dawn forgets them – now --

 

 

Whilst You Shuffle With Enlightenment To Date: A Thing With a Long Title Possibly About Loneliness

-1-

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand-

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep— while I weep!

O God! can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

Nicolette Ticine knew that if one needed a secret of the dragons, one would do best to seek it with the highest among them. She had a fair idea of who to ask, then, for a secret of the fey.

She met Valendil in the pirate’s new ship, formerly GENS Ephialtes, now The Ambush Bug. His quarters were full of antiques, and he collected clocks. They drank feycalyptus-perfumed Fuziette in art-nouveau cups cut out of massive diamonds. Ticine Peahens pranced about the room, very proud of their tails which contained three more visible colors than the spectrum elsewhere, colors existing nowhere else in nature.

“The widow of pride deified asks me for assistance,” Valendil provoked, “and I’m expected to help.”

“Don’t think of it as helping. Think of it as using your cunning to survive a furious force of nature without parallel – me.”

The elf laughed. “Good. If you came to me with talk of ‘you owe me this’, by my honor, I wouldn’t give you any help. But you come to me now as Necessity – as Necessity with her children in harm’s way. That I can defy, but not resist.”

The dragoness sighed and appeared less threatening, allowing her woes to show, becoming thus prettier than she had ever been. “Then you do know how to get to Palantenna?”

“To reach the unreachable star!”

“You don’t know?”

“No, I was just quoting.” The pirate smirked. “Darling, I’ve been to Palantenna.”

“One of your intrepid journeys…”

“Not at all. As a youngling, so long– too long ago. In a dream.”

She groaned. “That is not what I need, I’d say.”

“Are you sure? I once met myself from another universe, where I was a samurai. He quoted to me from the Hagakure, It is a good viewpoint to see the world as a dream. When you have something like a nightmare, you will wake up and tell yourself that it was only a dream. It is said that the world we live in is not a bit different from this to which I replied, That sand's not gonna rake itself, Uarenjiru.”

“I fear to ask, but… Is there a point to your story?”

“Why, yes: I’m preparing you. You’ll hear many pointless stories in the course of your search, doubtlessly.”

“And you’re teaching me to unravel their meanings?”

“No, I’m showing you why you would be better off not questing at all.”

She laughed, with an edge of filigreed despair, like the harmonious silvery calligraphy in Valendil’s black silk night robe. “All right, you’ve shown and I’ve seen. More Palantenna, less talking like you’re goddamn Anaxerretibes.”

“Ah, if one day you’ll believe that which I once heard, believed and copied down in sand with my tears: All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact, and radiant. Then perhaps you could be mine.” He sighed. “You want Palantenna? I give you Palantenna. So much Palantenna do I give.”

“Please.”

“You are lovelier than a symmetriad in floral calyx phase. Ah well, as a Sage put it, Life’s full of precluded possibilities.” Valendil stood up, examined a set of ornamental hashi thoughtfully. “I told you it was a dream, yet it had a lifelike quality to it, an intensity of aliveness like washing feet in cold, terribly cold water. A lady of your refinement will certainly remember that part in the Duino Elegies about blühender Wehmut?”

“And she leads him”, she recited almost automatically, “easily through the wide landscape of Complaints, shows him the pillars of the temple or the remains of those strongholds where the Complaint-Princes once wisely ruled the land. She shows him the lofty tear-trees and fields of blooming pain and sadness. (They know the living only as soft foliage.)”

“Yes. The dream was the exact opposite of that.”

“Who was your guide?”

“She’s the swan and the daughter of the swan. Or, as an old nobody friend of mine called in song, cathleen ni houlihan.”

“Thanks to you I’m beginning to despise poetry. As a symbol of what now? Love? Fidelity? Purity, gracefulness, light? Swan song? A symbol of the Muses, daughters of Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, who is obviously the opposite of Eçaraia and also, coincidently, the name of that lawyer’s mother? Or are you referring to the fact that in some mythologies the first dragon is called ‘The Iron-Jawed Swan’?”

“Interesting,” said Valendil, distractedly snapping at photons with the hashi, “but I was thinking about light, mostly.”

“Light.”

“It’s been written: And they made by the lifting of Their hands, each god according to his sign, the Bright One with the flaring tail to seek from one end of the Worlds to the end of them again, to return again after a hundred years. Man, when thou seest the comet, know that another seeketh besides thee nor ever findeth out.”

“Charmingly discouraging. Luckily I’m no man.”

“As I’ve had opportunity to notice. By the way, what’s it with describing dragons with words like ‘sensuous’? And the eating of maidens? Sheesh. Can’t you focus on the slaughter and immolations?”

“No, the maidens are an important part of it, the lovelier the better. More cryptic clues please.”

“It has also been said: In an interstellar burst, I am back to save the universe.”

“Oh,” she said, and passed her tongue over a perfect cuspid, “an asteryad.”

“Humph. I should have been more tortuous, given you’re so clever.”

“You’re priceless.”

“They also say, don’t clap too loudly – it’s a very old world.”

“And by priceless I mean you’re a vain jackass.”

“Come not between the dragon and his... something that they also say. You hoard what you seek, you seek what you like.”

“I don’t like vain. You’re confusing it with a certain narcissism in bereftness, which is altogether another quality.”

“Right. Well, a real friend punches you in the face when you’re down. Because he cares. Because being nice is for strangers. Besides, dragons are supposed to love riddles.”

“Not when a dead loved one is in the picture, no, not quite.”

Valendil’s smile was gone in a flash. “The one who visited me and showed me my certainties were written in sand was the asteryad of Sigma Octantis.”

“Alright.” The widow turned to leave.

“One last thing, though. There’s a legend of a torturer who carved the likeness of a woman on the victim’s chest and both victim and torturer fell in love with her. My alternate self also quoted to me from Chuang Tse’s teachings: How do we know the dead long for life? Perhaps death is to awake from a dream, and we cannot remember why we lived at all?”

She did not face him to answer. “I’m not doing this for him. I’m doing this for myself.”

“Well, as long as you admit it.”

“Don’t you want him back at all?”

“Ah, as they say, …without the preening, posing Portuguese? It just doesn't feel right. So there’s that. Just think about this: we elves call this existence the Marred World. It’s a crappy place to exist in, but it’s what we’ve got.”

And she left. Valendil stood a while watching a sample of his own calligraphy on the wall before him, in a centuries-old bit of parchment. It stated: The sky hath stars and clouds; stars are immutable and indifferent, cloudscapes are utterly ephemeral, like kensho experiences within a dream.

Valendil went to a little brazilwood table with a sound-streaming cube on it. He began playing, and sung something he had composed about his dream of Palantenna:

“Apoptosis.

My certainties fell one by one

then many at a time,

slowly drifting,

like God’s heavenly dandruff.”

Which showed that, his good taste notwithstanding, he was an awful poet.

“Hey!” he complained to the narrator, “it just loses a lot in translation.”

No doubt.

-2-

As for his thirst for life, he had no other choice but to use it in the investigation and knowledge of the world, and, since he himself had been "detached," he had to become that intellectual power, that man who was all mind, that stranger among men. Indifferent, incapable of any strong indignation, love or hate, he left his paintings unfinished to devote his time to bizarre experiments; he became a person in whom his contemporaries sensed a mystery.

The planet that matters at Sigma Octantis was tidally locked. The side that faced the sun was one huge, sandy desert. Although hot, it wasn’t really too hot, neither was it all that dry: there were always clouds to make the sky interesting – and interesting it was, as there were regions where the sky was permanently locked in the inflamed colors of dawn and dusk, an endless Golden Hour (as photographers would have it, to the distaste of timekeepers). The side that faced away from the sun was covered in asphalt, and it rained all night. And it was, you’ll note, an endless night. The asphalt had air-conditioned drains and herds of cars went to and fro, not really cars but herd beasts identical to cars, except in having minds, albeit quite bovine minds. What’s important is that there was the reflection of red and white lights on the wet asphalt, and the sound of tires on wet asphalt, and also coldness, although it wasn’t really too cold. For it was an unnatural planet. Somewhere in the strip of land between both halves was a galactic créperie, famous and mysterious, called Something (to do vs. circadian unease), the only settlement in the star system. Cynical, deep-thinking men met in the créperie to talk and sigh, consuming (most usually) banana splits (chocolate, white chocolate and cream ice-cream) with marshmallow, white spray-y cream thing, crunchy mix and all.

There Nicolette began her search. She overheard the ennui-buddhas chatting, trying to identify someone who could be of use.

“The premise,” said a bald green-eyed mathematician, “is this: Pandimensional entity, created the universes, was displeased, sent Earth an army of golems made of the substrate energy from before the universes, but these had no minds. So that they might gain the “software”, the entity taught some peoples how to dream, and waited for the course of oneiric evolution.”

“Yes, but look at that universe – crap! A good premise wasted.”

“Speaking of dreams, I once dreamed of the most intelligent book ever, entitled Pulsota: Innocence Lost. It was a work of cleverest gimmickry, but also finest allegory and beautiful poetry. At times, one almost thought one could notice a formula behind the symmetry of its continuous epiphanies and profundities. It was the book I always wanted to write, and would never dare to, because it was so perfect. It literally had geometrical symmetry, shaped like an hexagon, made of many small triangles, divided in six arcs and a central area, color-coded in patterns and spread like a blossom, like a garden, with color coding themes of parts and relationships between parts. But then I found a book by Quine completely about literary criticism of Pulsota. I confronted the author: ‘In Quine’s time, there was no internet blogging!’ As soon as I confronted him, it was as if wavelengths collapsed. I no longer lived in a world where Pulsota had ever existed, and I was condemned to be me, just fucking me. In other words, I woke up. Ironically, the only teaching of Pulsota I remembered thereafter was this bitterest one: that confronting contradictions may shatter precious illusions. Innocence Lost, indeed. I then specialized the concept of Pulsota. It now means this shattering, when you are not sure whether what was shattered was an illusion, a frail reality, or a possibility, like a collapsing eigenstate in quantum physics. Or something else.”

“That’s the second interesting concept you’ve dreamt, isn’t it? Together with Pherke (or phreke; φễҝę), defined as ‘the soul, when no such thing as a soul exists’.”

“They had to fight a war to stop us believing in pherkes. Maybe they lost.”

Another table. A handsome bare-chested young man with a rough bag over his head and a broadsword at his feet told with deliberate eloquence, “Each stage from initiation onwards goes at its own rhythm for each person. The main stage, when it's learned not to fear flight and embracing the euphoria with the crashing down, I was master of everyone there, beacon of singing wisdom, that it's all to be celebrated. But the final stage at the parking lot, when everyone returns to the active potency of the world enlightened by the great learning, I could never find my car as they left one by one. I said perhaps I was meant to stick around to make sure no one was left behind, but I've no idea if I'll get to leave then either. (But I do help the stragglers in their bizarre quests it's amazing.)” He addressed a picture-frame. Nicolette was startled to find the person in the photograph looking like an amalgam of herself and Krystal, and only walked past the sad man when she had learned to her satisfaction that that was the vestal chosen by the Organ of Silences and Permutations of Voids, in another story and multiverse far, far away. She left contented for knowing there is nothing perfection can resemble other than itself.

Another table. A wide-cheeked pointy-eared philanthropist was saying: “Anyway, that’s how I went from ‘Fuuuuuck, it took me a decade of lonely depression to come to terms with the fact no woman is perfect and then a glance at you sets me back to square one’ to ‘You're one great big ball of bitch.’ But the big thing I wanted to say right then. Your people tests trustworthiness. You take trust away when the trusted person fails you. My people tests trustiness. We stop being trustworthy when we’re not immediately trusted. But know it: when we are trusted, no one is more faithful.”

“But what revenge can you exact at all?”

“None, and it kills us. We are a dead people.”

His interlocutor, a short young woman with that Tehrangeles curve of beautiful despair in the corner of her eye, whispered to him: “There are only two types of people who deliberately seek out loneliness: those waiting for someone to reach out to them, and the insane. The former usually end up as the latter over the course of time. And it’s good: it’s healing from weakness into horror.”

She leaned back and took a swig off her Damascene tea. “I don’t understand the world. The world is far more forgiving than I believe possible.”

The pointy-eared one looked deeply into his tea: black with lemon grass, red sandalwood, cardamom husks and jasmine blossoms. “Do you ever worry? About the watery clock-smasher?”

(He referred to the following piece they had recently read: "They love me," the Imam's voice says, "because I am water. I am fertility and she is decay. They love me for my habit of smashing clocks. Human beings who turn away from God lose love, and certainty, and also the sense of His boundless time, that encompasses past, present and future; the timeless time, that has no need to move. We long for the eternal, and I am eternity. She is nothing: a tick, or a tock.")

“Never,” she replied. “As Lorca wrote, Ignorante del agua voy buscando/ una muerte de luz que me consuma.”

He laughed. “‘As if it came from music television.’”

“‘So saith the ruler of Bethos.’” And laughed too.

Another table. A tall Hindoo affirmed: “All this is to answer the great question, ‘Can good conversation be impersonal?’ I think so. Lost in Translation depicts lonely clean consumer society tragedy. Well, I like this consumer society, it’s tragic and epic for those in the know. I love Muzak. Uniform sterility. Salespeople who remain silent and unobtrusive. Isolation, silence, privacy. Night lights turned to neon by careful photographic exposure. Minimalist alterity. I will kill to protect this, for to me this is Elysium.”

“I agree. It’s a Waiting for Godot thing, too. Why have to link the present to our personal pasts or futures to endow it with meaning? Can’t every atom of existence stand for itself? A genuinely transcendent impersonal conversation can be taken as a slice of two or more lives and savored rootlessly, like sashimi taken from a live fish, afterwards placed back into the fish tank to swim on some more.”

“A picture, frozen in time, in these cases a puzzling picture, or an abstract one, background all unanswerable questions. The void of unanswerability outside every text.”

“Swim on,” concurred the interlocutor, coincidentally facing Nicolette at that instant.

Another table. A short guy with light brown skin read aloud from a little book: “At Oimyakon a temperature has been recorded of -97.8 F. In far lesser cold, steel splits, tires explode, and larch trees shower sparks at the touch of an axe. As the thermometer drops, your breath freezes into crystals, and tinkles to the ground with a noise they call 'the whispering of the stars'. Among the native peoples a myth exists that in the extremest cold words themselves freeze and fall to earth. In spring they stir again and start to speak, and suddenly the air fills with out-of-date gossip, unheard jokes, cries of forgotten pain, words of long-disowned love.”

His companion laughed. “Who will give us a giver whose gifts do not die with him, when even the stars fall off their light like leaves?”

“Good timecycle,” interrupted Nicolette. “Do you know much about asteryads?”

The woman (elderly) laughed again and replied: “I know a lot! Ask something specific and gauge how much is that!”

“Well, I’d like to meet the asteryad of this system.”

“Hmm. Fey folk fickle be, but celestial bodies have been always used as metaphors for precision and a master plan, carried to perfection. The sub-lunar world is a metonymy, a placeholder, if you will, for perfection.”

“How platonic.”

She turned to her friend. “You know that Joy song? Happy, happy like God’s suns fly across the firmament's splendid design... Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen durch des Himmels prächt'gen ch'i-yün shêng-tung. That’s the Chinese concept, in arts, of ‘breath rhythm in life-motion’, possibly the most important concept in the world. A people who liked the concept of Ming, the divine mandate, and spoke things like ‘the heavenly bodies are regular in their flight, so should the superior man be in his practice of virtue’. What I’m saying is that all fairies are vain, but asteryads manage to combine that with quite the self-righteousness and self-importance.”

The woman’s friend shook his head dismissively: “Terrible. Like Tolkien’s goddamn angel-elves?”

“Indeed. But they’re very tractable. The lady of there,” she pointed to the star, immobile at the horizon, “is quite elusive, but if you find her you’ll probably get what you want. Watch out for the desert’s hobo, though.”

“A man can’t stand between me and what I seek, right now,” said Nicolette.

“You never know. The song also speaks of joy, that by it beggars become brothers-of-princes… Bettler werden Fürstenbrüder.”

“I don’t think there will be an overabundance of joy if he gets in my way,” she replied, darkly.

“Go, then, and seek the spot of the planet closest to the sun. Go, joyful like a soldier to victory. Wie ein Held sum Siegen. Though I’ll immediately grant ‘joyful’ is an adjective that seldom applies to soldiers marching to war, at least if they have any understanding. Perhaps it’s a joke. Loaded with irony.” The old woman did not smile.

“In which case the simile applies perfectly,” Nicolette said, and left.

-3-

A fool dashed onward at a reckless pace

Till in the desert he came face to face

With one who wore the ragged dervish cloak,

And asked: "What is your work?" The dervish spoke:

"Poor shallow wretch, can you not see I faint

With this strict pressure of the world's constraint?"

"Constraint? That can't be right," the man replied;

"The empty desert stretches far and wide."

The dervish said: "If there is no strict Way,

How has it led you to me here today?"

She flew over the desert, piercing dragon eyes scanning the sand below without boredom or tiredness. And then she sensed a presence beside her, suddenly, as if from nowhere. She saw a man in a flying hammock, flying level beside her, grinning.

He cried out in greeting: “Invisible mazes, milady!”

“The desert hobo. Let’s get this done with.”

“I beg your pardon?” he asked, still grinning.

“I have no idea what you are or what you want, but since in the end I’ll get past you, let’s spare some time and effort here. Just tell me anything useful you have to say and go away.”

“Confident, aren’t we? Let me guess, a journey for grace. Information. Correction of wrongness in the world. A dead loved one.”

“Mm-hmm. Are you part of the solution, part of the problem, or one of them blessed mixings?”

“You mean mixed blessings, surely.”

“I don’t know anymore.”

“Good girl. Well, you won’t find her (she who is bedight in light) flying around like a huge indigo lizard. It just doesn’t work that way.”

“What a pity. This would be more efficient.”

“Yeah, but you know women. You make things harder than strictly necessary to make the quest more of an end in itself, or so I hear.”

“An accusation heavily biased, I daresay.”

“I’m a space hobo. I drink all day and tan my leather in my urine all night. May I teach you something, iguana?”

“You know… I think you will anyway. Let’s land.”

They did.

“How can you reach the Simorgh’s splendid court?/ First find its gateway, and the sun, long-sought,/ Erupts through clouds; when victory is won,/ Your sight knows nothing but the blinding sun. These asterbitches, they’re all Furies,” said the hobo, putting a tablet of something (akin to chewing tobacco but from space) in his mouth. He had two teeth up, three down in his mouth, and his breath was of alcohol and sin.

“Furies.”

“Yeah, girl, Erinyes. Personifications of retribution. Persecutors of those who break natural laws. Karma police.”

“Cute theory. A nod to Heraclitus’ saying the Furies would not allow Helios to move the sun off its course. Very apropos the whole stars and suns theme. Even if the idea of karma childishly extends to the cosmos the desire to carry out our petty, unimportant revenges. Get to the point.”

“There is no point, there’s only the getting there.”

“Oh no, not another of those.”

“Exaduating, I know, but I’m telling you of the difference between the Classical social contract and the Biblical one. In the latter, man and God only have one another’s words that the Covenant will be followed, and Nature is the medium by which the latter rewards the compliance of the former. In the pagan social contract, Nature is the active party ensuring both men and gods fulfill their oaths, by exacting terrible punishment on any mortal or deity who goes against Natural Law. And since we don’t mean Nature personified here, not exactly, we’re talking about the self-enforcing Nature of oaths. A bit like Karma as something preceding the deities in Hinduism.”

“Ok. I would ask ‘what’s that got to do with me anyway?’, but I’ll get along with it so we can finish before nightfall.”

“There’s no nightfall in this planet,” said the hobo, surprised.

“Exactly.”

“Oh.”

“Let me see. You’re saying the asteryads are enforcers of natural law, but not in the service of a deity or even personified principle?”

“That’s right, and accurately worded too. As a great man has said, ‘Since the dawn of time, man has yearned to destroy the Sun.’ Yeah, take that, jaguar-sun that is eaten by all things.” He shook his fist at the star. “I hate those fucking personified principles, too. Especially that fucking chaos. Chaos I hate the most, chaos is really dumb.”

“A worthy statement. What are you saying, then? She won’t help me, because death is an inevitable of nature, and shouldn’t be undone?”

“Death! What a joke! What do we know of it? We know death only as absence. ‘Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell,’ as I believe someone wrote, but it’s the same as asking where the cube went when an ice-cube melts on the sidewalk, or which is the original cell after mitosis. Things stop being,” he began snapping his fingers, “like this. Now the one I’m talking to is a completely different being from the one I was talking to a few words back in this sentence, because of how time and space work on the level of quantum discretization, to say nothing of the relational properties in your brain, ever shifting in an orgy of snakes of thought, sinuously gliding synapse to synapse. No, no, death is one big rhetorical approximation, like everything else around, although I do admit it’s a rather cruel thing to say to someone who’s dealing with what appears so ultimate and definitive – truth ain’t comfort. No, life too is a dream and illusion, a cybernetic machine-dream of epistemological phantoms confused, for greedily pragmatic reasons of evolution, with the reality they vaguely depend on. You’re a point of view mourning another point of view, but I imagine you are over-animally enough to know how to transcend a point of view. How immensely fungible the points of view, anyway! How fragile and mechanic. All worms are the same worm. I mean they have neural isomorphism. Every synapse in a worm is exactly the same as in any other worm, so they’re exactly the same mind. The same poor, simple mind, but a mind and point of view nonetheless. Don’t find me romantic, in my theory even thermostats have points of view, and ultimately, everything – and nothing. But back to the worm, the conquering worm. Any worm will react the same to the same situations. For all purposes, they are the same being, in myriad iterations that only over the whelming time spans of evolutionary history may hope to change its mind about anything. All worm sex is masturbation, in a human conception of alterity! And you dragons. One of the greatest men to have lived in the cosmos once wrote, ‘Much as a hand, emerging from the water fingers-first, appears above the surface in the form of five seemingly separate and independent items, so do dragons, emerging from the lairs of their configurational space, on occasion appear to be plural, though in point of fact they are quite singular.’ Telluric shenanigans, girl. All wyrms are the same wyrm. And all points of view are only alleged points of view. Because all history is the repetition of narrative archetypes, echoes of the dreamtime outside history religious experience is about – in illo tempore etc. You’re Isis; she could blow life into Osiris in a way best left unsaid. You’re Orpheus – don’t look back before Hades allows you to; Gilgamesh to the dark kingdom of Ninazu came for his homiez (bros before chthonic deities, yo). You’re the goddamn Green Lantern in the storyline when you become Parallax. You’re every woman bitterly grieving for her lover, and possibly every man. This story has played out several times, metonymies of an ideal quest older than time. ‘You think they fell a long way?’ You’re about to take one great archetypal tumble. It’s perfectly d’accord with the laws of nature, which are, perhaps, simply laws of narrative. In what is termed a “kerygmatic mode,” myths become “myths to live by” and metaphors “metaphors to live in” – a process that goes on continuously, all reality is retrospective and that’s how dreams are so convincing – false memories. Not that true memories are even possible, given how elusive they are. But yeah: Ecclesiastes 1:9, child. The end of a point of view has no relevance from the supreme point of view, from the inviolate order, from that point of view that is like the circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. So all significance is that which its fellow points of view may attribute to it, but what do limited points of view know? Their world is that of phantasms, self-deceit and dreams where a woman gets them on the run around, run around. The puppets chase the phantoms and then the crawling monster eats them, the conquering wyrm. But it’s phantoms they chase. And thus, if you do mourn, know that you mourn because you want to, not because you have to, not because Nature brought it upon you. You mourn for your own masochistic pleasure, or some other selfish reason, not because of the one who died. ‘One day, poor death, thou shalt die,’ Donne said, or something like that, and that’s very illustrative of the state of wisdom when you fully live by the realization of what life and death amount to. And what confounded value attributed to living, when the most active of all angels is Zlalfalflalfiel, the angel of utopias becoming dystopias. Each in the despairing posture of his fall. You’d think his job description was quite limited, but no, he affects every intelligent being from self-awareness until illumination or cessation (which are quite similar), making the worlds we build ourselves (thinking we are perceiving reality) worse than they need be. Better to remember the philosophical parable about the three holy men and the jar of vinegar. No, not Lao Zi, Confucius or Buddha, the other parable. Zarrothustra, Anaxerretibes and vQ each takes from a jar of vinegar (an allegory for life) and makes a delicious salad with it. Zarrothustra comments, after eating his salad: ‘Life can be made perfectly sane through one’s absorbing and containing within oneself all the cosmos’ madness.’ Anaxerretibes says, after eating his salad: ‘Life can be made clear through one’s absorbing and containing within oneself all the cosmos’ complexity.’ And vQ makes the salad and does not eat it, but says: ‘Life can be made all-passionate through one’s absorbing and containing within oneself all the cosmos’ ennui.’ Finally, let us ponder one more thing about the desirability of death – Paul Erdös epitaph, ‘Finally I am becoming stupider no more’. In it is contained all the meaning of life and death.”

“Nice speech.”

“I’ve been practicing for centuries.”

“Bored?”

“Greatly. I’ve been exiled, and can’t leave this desert.”

“You forgot to talk about operating thetans.”

“You mock me. That’s alright. I take it you are unconvinced?”

“You could say that. Your philosophy or religion thingy simply can’t change what I feel.”

“Well, allow me to illustrate.”

The hobo shot himself in the head and fell to the ground.

Nicolette stared at the corpse.

“Emphatic, though not decisive,” she said to herself.

“Really?” said a voice behind her. She turned. It was the hobo. The body lay there, losing heat.

“Ta-da. Abraca-fucking-daver.”

“Hmm. Can’t you die?”

“Nope. I was a street philosopher, long ago, but a higher entity placed me here in this world, unable to leave, and unable to die, just to illustrate to the universe the pointlessness – not so much of death, because it’s unfair to those who grieve to say death is pointless – but of resurrection, even if it were possible. So what if you can bring back everyone who died before their time, and make the universe right, and happy for everyone? – to live isn’t what people really want, or else they wouldn’t lay down their lives for what they believe in – and even to be happy isn’t what people really want, or else they wouldn’t hold on to the pains they feel they must carry. You’re dead. So what? You live. So what? You’re happy or unhappy. So what? You’re worth caring about. So…—ah, that doesn’t work, that bypasses disinterest by definition. People want what they want, and care about what they care about – a matter of Will, to have a practical concept to wield, if you pardon the pun. The world is a flowing ballet of wheels within wheels, wills within wills, a hierarchy of rivulets forming one vast hydrographic system that may be called the Way or the cosmic Will. And thus is our ballet irrigated, although I confess these metaphors are sort of too unrelated.” As he spoke, the hobo went on killing himself dozens of times, and by the end they were standing on a small hill of dead him. “In conclusion and respecting your rush, girl: So what if people live or die, as long as it makes a good story! We are all irrelevant but to ourselves and a handful who confuse us with angels. All is either part of a higher order of significance or nothing matters, and the result is the same either way: ataraxia.”

“Is it even possible to state your point more clearly, or should I just presume you were wasting my time?”

“This: if the Fury gives you any sass about natural laws – I'll be judge, I'll be jury, said cunning old Fury… – tell her you know what law there is, what law alone: Do what thou etc. Stupid, perhaps; but it’s a stupid universe.”

“Alright, I’ll consider saying that. But it is pretty stupid.”

“I’m sorry. Good bye, girl. May you die only when narratively convenient.” The hobo killed himself one last time, presumably rematerializing elsewhere in the planet.

She walked away.

-4-

Doom am I, full-ripe, dealing death to the worlds, engaged in devouring mankind. Even without thy slaying them, not one of the warriors ranged for battle against thee shall survive.

In the distance we see a burning tower. It burns yet is not consumed. Like a chimney, however, smoke pours out its myriad windows flowing like hydrothermal vent suspensions across the thermocline. We are far, but we can smell burning paper. It has been burning for millennia. No, for billions of trillions of ages, for the exemplary infinities of time conveniently referred as countless kalpas. It was there, ablaze, before the universe was, and barring the whim of some omnipotent potentate or another, will be there long after the proverbial chairs are on the proverbial tables and the proverbial light is turned off. Knowing the universe, however, whoever leaves last will steal the light bulbs. That’s how things are.

We speak of the tower: it burns, very close to the point of midday unending. That point, we can see, is marked by a large stone, a white marble square, with carved steps. It is uncomfortably bright in such sunlight. Right in its middle stands a broken column, which never left a shadow. The asteryad stands leaning with her back against the column, watching the tower burn. Burning pages fly out of the windows and are spread over miles around that place, but are all ultimately consumed. Occasionally one passes near the asteryad, who is also painful to the eyes in all this light, being very pale (for her species, sunlight is literally something that only happens to other people), wearing a perfectly white stola and visor-like sunglasses, and with bright cyan hair. She grabs the piece of paper in midair, reads it, and lets it go. The tower burns silently: the only noise is from the thousands of clocks half-buried in the sand in that place, spaced evenly in circles, all around the marble column and platform.

At her feet sits a large wolfish dog, whose coat is as if made of shadows or the darkness in the unseen zones of the mirror-world. All things were one with its weariness.

The clocks tick in unison.

Time changes.

The asteryad read aloud: “…A book, if you expect wonders of it, should also be read twice. It should be read once in youth, when you are younger than its heroes, and the second time when you are advanced in age and the book’s heroes become younger than yourself. That way you will see them from both sides of their years, and they will be able to put you to the test on the other side of the clock, where time stands still…”

“How fitting,” said Nicolette, stepping up the marble platform from behind her.

The asteryad said nothing, only smiled. The dog raised its head, tongue hanging out goofily.

The dragoness stood beside her, looked at the burning tower: “What’s that?”

“It’s the hell of books,” the dog replied in a sweet, lightly accented voice.

Nicolette examined the dog, somewhat bewildered. “Oh? I never knew books went to hell.”

“All books go to hell,” the dog said, with strange finality.

“What about dragons? Is there a hell for us, as well, in an iconic piece of scenery somewhere around a bored star?”

The dog scratched itself affecting boredom, prompting a chuckle from the asteryad, who then answered: “Ah, no. Dragons never leave.”

“Not even to ‘the other side of the clock’? Where’s the justice.”

“Jacob wrestled all night through and saw Penuel, the Face of God. He wrestled the angel of time, which immobilizes men until daybreak – until it’s time to wake up.” The asteryad then closed her mouth, pressing lips tightly, as if she had said too much.

“Why does everybody keep insisting on this theme? Not particularly conducive to action, is it? Besides, in the Empire we usually conceive of time as canvas or stage... for decisive strokes, or at least merriment in endless theatrical posturing.”

The asteryad faced Nicolette, examining her, but said nothing.

The dragoness sighed. “Yet the painting is still but a painting of some real thing, I suppose. I’m not sure I’m keeping at least a semblance of eptness in thinking in the terms of this world.”

The asteryad turned her face away, hesitated, and then spoke: “Cosmologically, Leviathan is the chaotic element within creation, it is the creation as we see it now (through a small net darkly), the world of time and space extending indefinitely beyond us, a limitless extension the safest and most inescapable prison.”

“Ah. That’s the angel of time, whose grasp we can only escape by waking up at daybreak. Which, I imagine, is your job as sun.”

The asteryad did not reply.

“That leviathan thing is quite racist, you know. We dragons resent being typecast as incarnated principles of pure will and awesomeness.”

The asteryad looked at her, suddenly broke into laugher and lowered her head in a greeting. “I’m named Évora-禅.” Her bearing was noticeably oriental, although it was difficult to affirm with certainty the same of her facial features because of the visor. “I wish I could help.”

“Well, there are two little things. I love one who is dead. The universe also appears to need some saving.”

“Job 3:8.”

Nickie snorted. “What’s this about arousing dragons? You’re alright, but I’m not Nike.”

Ch’an shook her head, laughing. “Isaiah 13:22.”

“What you’re hinting at there doesn’t sound too good at all for me. You speak of those who hate the day – who desire to stay dreaming, I gather. Are you talking of me, of wanting life instead of death? Is that the big idea, that life is a dream and death is awesome?”

Ch’an continued smiling, but did not reply.

The dragoness sighed. “Well, at least when you said ‘her days shall not be prolonged’, in the context of the angel of time thing and the waking up outside of time, that doesn’t appear like a bad thing at all.”

The asteryad gave a little yelp of mirth. “You see!” She looked up, at her sun. “I recall that, in vodoun, people are said to have five souls. Or was it six? Anyway. The z’étoile is the one spiritual component that resides not in the body but in the sky. It is our fate in the stars.”

“Fate is a troubling concept, to say the least.”

Ch’an raised her arm and grabbed a flying, burning page. She read: “If these doctrines are thought to redound to the discredit of humanity, I find myself to be of this species without complaining about it; and if I conclude that all the pains and pleasures of this life are only illusions, I can add that all human ratiocinations are only madness. And when I say all, I do not except my own calculations.”

“That sounds like something that hobo would say.”

“That hobo is silly. He’s on his own no-ego trip. He learned the great mystery of leaving the flesh, of disdaining the flesh, and never understood to ask why there was flesh at all.” She shook her head, pursing her lips. “It’s one of the easiest mistakes. It’s happening all the time. ‘Maybe.’ ‘Definitely.’ It’s sad.”

“A big sin, is it?”

“Nah, sin has shown itself a counterproductive concept – it sought to give freedom, not take it away – freedom from the lower natural condition. It’s not a sin against the dream – a ridiculous notion. It’s just an error, not to appreciate the dream while it lasts. A waste… But listen to a brief apology I’ll make once in forever. What do I know? Just from my nature and cosmic role I can teach a thing or two. Don’t rely on it being revelation-like true, I can only provide plausible or exhilarating to believe to the best of the part I play.”

A page was pushed by the wind into Nicolette’s body, where it clung. She took it and read it aloud: “He vetoed the consumption of prawns, those bizarre other-worldly creatures which no member of the faithful had ever seen, and required animals to be killed slowly, by bleeding, so that by experiencing their deaths to the full they might arrive at an understanding of the meaning of their lives, for it is only at the moment of death that creatures understand that life has been real, and not some sort of dream.”

The asteryad looked at her hand, radiant with the reflection of sunlight.

“The hobo may have told you of my kind’s affinity with the cosmic order of the Supreme Ultimate, t’ai chi, but that’s incorrect. Or rather, like a fallen star said once, ‘Truth is a local phenomenon…’ As the Navajo claim, the trickster deity of chaos, the Coyote, is who scattered randomly the stars, in our configuration. We are the daughters of the Coyote, and we are keepers of the Cosmic Order. Oppositions are, too, made of evanescent dreamstuff.”

“Like life and death?” the dragoness asked.

The asteryad nodded.

“I just… would rather he were here.”

“There is no absence,” Ch’an insisted.

In frustration the dragoness cried out: “He agonizes, o Kythereia, delicate Adonis, the black sleep in the eyes, o Adonis, o Adonis!” She touched the column and a crack danced in its surface.

Ch’an passed an arm around her shoulders. “Yes. I understand.”

“I’m sorry… it was the only way I could think to express…”

“I understand. To die for love of that bewitching sight. I understand.” Ch’an looked up again, at her sun, as if to draw in light. “A monk asked Hsiang-nien: ‘What is your eye that does not deceive?’ The master answered, ‘Look, look, winter is approaching’. Winter, dragon – appreciating the dream is also appreciating its pains, which you have plenty. But draw confidence that there is a moment when everything shines from an inner light, and there are no more shadows. All shadows are made nothing in the one unchanging light of Truth’s eternal sun.”

“But – how can I wait?”

“You don’t have to. That moment is the present.” Ch’an removed her sunglasses.

And then the widow gasped, for she felt the presence of her loved one, for she felt the Way operating, the great emptiness which is never exhausted. She exclaimed, finally understanding: “見小曰明, 守柔曰強. 用其光, 復歸其明, 無遺身殃; 是為習常. That’s what with the leaving and the treasuring!”

Ch’an nodded, and she unfolded her wings, which had feathers like the indigo bunting’s. “同其塵, 湛兮似或存. 吾不知誰之子, 象帝之先.”

“How selfish I have been, and weak, and self-indulgent, but above all – how blind! And you – regardless of obsolete anthropotheistic holy text quoting you appear to be some kind of Way-fairy?”

“I am but a device, but I am a device who revels. Would that everyone knew to say that.”

“And now I see how different you are from the hobo.”

“He’s a misguided Gnostic. There must be a middle ground between his radical rejection of nature and this world and the uncritical worshipfulness of its every aspect (and only aspects). The mistake is not the seeing the numinous in the sensorial world but believing the numinous originates from the sensorial world. De telluris theoria sacra. ‘Consider the lilies of the field.’ They are proof we never left the ‘good’, higher creation. That’s from the same passage where it’s spoken of ‘they of little faith’. Faith shouldn’t be about belief; it’s about a way of seeing, a gestalt of happiness, truth and clarity.”

“I recall something referring to that… They will look for other meanings, even in my silence.”

Ch’an just smiled and nodded. “You are now ready for Palantenna,” said the asteryad. “You woke up. I will teach you the way, and the song for the way, and where and what to unlock with the way. As is to be expected, it has been with you all along. But what matters is that the night of time is over; it’s morning and you woke up.”

The dragon watched the light of the twin suns refract through windborne jewel-like feathers, over incalculable time, in that endless midday, among the clocks which had, when, exactly, she had not noticed, stopped ticking.

We, who watched this scene at its beginning, have long ago been blown away by the dry wind and consumed by the relentless incandescence of hell.

-5-

...for how should man force nature to yield up her secrets but by successfully resisting her, that is to say, by unnatural acts?

“Did not the fox with ten thousand tails drown out of love?” chanted the cleric of Blackheart, in his black velvet cloak.

“We hope that you choke, that you choke,” sang the faithful. The interior of the cathedral was draped in funeral flags and black rose petals danced down from the upper levels, where the hunchbacked ghouls tolled the muffled ebon bells.

“Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most/ must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth,/ the tree of knowledge is not that of life.”

“Renegere, renegere vitam,” the faithful sang in sinking despair. Black tea leaves burned in obsidian braziers.

“O Lord of revelers in woe, o Prince of the kingdom where lost souls exist in their last state forever! Oh you in whose lips happiness is a hapax legomenon. We still dream of your hill and its thorny crown and its solitary tree of hanged lovers, and the red that dews its grass! Yea, the tree that may truthfully say, ‘I have this comfort: that I have gained the least by love’. We crave your icy needle blessing, o Lord!”

“Ach! Mein Regenbogen der Schwere!” intoned the faithful. For the theodicy of the Blackheartists was that suffering makes wisdom necessary.

“Was it not said: I know it’s hard for you to think the world could work in this strange way, but there it is? And in the end, of whom will it be said: All he had seen was ashes… he alone had been spared? We must ponder this incessantly.”

“We pine, endlessly we pine for old, unhappy far-off things, and battles long ago.”

“Is it not written of Prophet L-43492: When he wrote ‘fainting with aesthetic exaltation’ he was not exaggerating. And it was in all seriousness that he told Kleiner that a man is like a coral insect - that his only destiny is to ‘build vast beautiful, mineral things for the moon to delight in after he is dead’?”

“A rose has no inside and no outside,” they chanted.

“Has not the prophet K-9174 taught: ‘There is no need for you to leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in raptures it will writhe at your feet’?”

“Strange is the night where black stars rise, and strange moons circle through the skies,” they sang.

“Brothers in revelry,” said the cleric, “the time I best understood what it is like to be alive was during the two days I was dead. The world is rushing headlong toward destruction. The world is destroyed every second and created anew. This is not the world you were a child in. That was half a billion worlds ago.”

“All of us are refugees, driven from our human state.”

“Remember the story that goes: Suddenly another man appeared. It was the pretty maiden's gloomy and wicked brother! He drew out a long sharp knife, and while the young man was kissing the rose, this wicked one stabbed him to death! Then he cut off the head and buried head and body in the soft earth beneath the linden tree. That story was the favorite of prophet M-5601, who wrote: Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary, the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it to an ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death — which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors.”

“They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame, clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil,” they sang.

“If your heart is an obstacle, tell it to be silent, because all great things are great in spite of human beings.”

They chanted with heartfelt belief, “Inflatable gibborah,/ my role is to serve you./ Is there a heaven?/ I’d like to think so.”

“These are materiall teares, crosses come neare,” recited the cleric. “In this day of St. Edmund and St. Severian, we stand blessed under an impotent curse. The lovers may approach.”

A young couple stepped up towards the altar, he handsome in a princely white cape, she luminous in an immaculate, diaphanous bridal dress.

“Why are you here?”

“We wish our love to be perfect,” she said.

“And with our love the roses water,” he said.

“Raise our love into the pure, the true, and the immutable,” she said.

“And in the roses to sleep past the world,” he completed.

“Kneel.” They obeyed. The cleric placed a hand on the girl’s head. “Hesperia, the tenderest type of woman or of dream, born in the westward islands of the blest, where the shadows of all happy and holy things live beyond the sunset a sacred and a sleepless life, dawns upon his eyes a western dawn, risen as the fiery day of passion goes down, and risen where it sank. Here, between moonrise and sunset, lives the love that is gentle and faithful, neither giving too much nor asking -- a bride rather than a mistress, a sister rather than a bride.”

She turned toward her lover and said, “A change has come over me, and that change has come through you, through you alone.”

The cleric placed a hand on the groom’s head. “He seemed not even to miss his freedom; his noble body, furnished almost to the bursting point with all that it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it too; somewhere in his jaws it seemed to lurk… The African panther is like a lion, but with longer legs, and a more slender body. It is completely white, spattered with black spots like rosettes. Its beauty delights the other animals, which would all flock to it were it not for the panther's terrible stare. Aware of this, the panther lowers its eyes; other animals approach it to drink in such beauty, and the panther pounces on the nearest of them.”

He turned to his lover and said, “To live is to war with the trolls.”

The cleric raised his hand in benediction: “Gauss before you, Helarxe behind you, TRDRT at your right side, Eçaraia at your left side. The Black Heart within you, as ever.” He gave a keen-edged, mirror-like, icicle-like dagger to the bride.

She calmly opened her dress and drove the dagger through her virginal ivory breast. “Fearful symmetry!” she gasped triumphantly, and died with a shudder.

The groom watched dispassionately, while the cleric sighed. “Simama mwehu!” he ordered.

The groom stood up. He was handed a graphite-color sword, elegant, cold. “I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.” He drove the sword through his stomach, and fell to his knees. Leaning over his wife-in-death, with blood-painted lips, he kissed her in the mouth, pulled the sword sideways, and died.

The cleric stepped close to the newlyweds, until his boot touched their mingled blood. “Beneath their eyelids weighed down by sleep, beneath their eyelids anointed with the balsam and hemlock of sleep, there was no sign of the greenish crescent of their dead eyes, for the darkness was too great, the moist darkness of time, the murk of the cave of eternity.”

“Amen, amen! Glory be!” the faithful replied, and then they burst into song: “We don’t need our Ai!s to ‘ey!, we don’t need our I’s to be, we don’t need our eyes to see…”

A dark chill lowered itself upon the congregation. All lips went pale in the presence of the Divine.

The cleric murmured, “Ar cennen, ar en! malwa rocco, ar ye hamne sessë haryanë i essë Nuru, ar Mandos se-hilyanë.”

The faithful fell to their knees and prayed, while shockwaves of aesthetic ecstasy beat in their hearts louder than the relentless bells.

Nicolette swooped down from the upper levels, landing beside the cleric, who ignored her.

She groaned. “…the after-dream of the reveller upon opium…”

Blood trickled down from the cleric’s hands closed in prayer around a thorn-rosary. He did not open his eyes. “Hello, prodigal daughter.”

“Father Keno. I expected Father Kairo to be honest.”

“My brother has died, interestingly enough, like Kathar before him, as military chaplains at the battlefront. I am the last as it is.”

“And you, haven’t you volunteered?”

“If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for to morrow we die.”

“Well, did you receive my message?”

“Yes, I have prepared what you asked. Even if you have forsaken the faith.”

“Never completely.” She glanced at the two bodies nearby. “Though I think you can understand why I preferred to marry according to the Imperial Religion rite.”

“But that bastard angel is against Liebestod, despite what one might think. It’s practically the very thing opposite to what he stands for.” The cleric opened his eyes and hands, revealing slashed palms. “Ah, if I had time to speak to you of caduceus and ourobouros, of dragons and their role being dead, of how slain dragon heals the earth! Of the vast length of Tale unfolding from the to-come with the steady grace of a jeweled and purposeful serpent… Of your kind it is said ‘somewhere in the universe a sacred cipher exists to express their exact number…’ and because of the generalized continuum hypothesis…”

“Yes, yes. But you don’t have time.”

“Ah well, like some guy said, ‘The literary entertainment of one age is the religion of the next.’ We’re left with uma visão da condição trágica do Homem, só num Universo hostil, com argentinos bicando seus calcanhares por toda a eternidade... Did you bring the price? Po blatu, eh?”

She handed him a small tome. “I got it at Sappho. With an introduction by Pierre Sans-Fontaine, as requested.”

Father Keno flipped open to a random page and Nicolette could read in his mind as he read silently: “Kali is a feminine form of the Sanskrit word "kala," meaning "time". It also means "black". Kali has therefore been translated variously as "She who is time," "She who devours time," "She who is the Mother of time," "She who is black," and "She who is black time". Kali's association with blackness stands in contrast to her consort, Shiva, whose body is covered by the white ashes of the cremation ground (Sanskrit: 'śmaśan') in which he meditates, and with which they are both associated, hence Kali's epithet 'Śmaśanâ.' (…) In many sources Kali is praised as the highest reality or greatest of all deities. The Nirvana-tantra says the gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva all arise from her like bubbles in the sea, ceaselessly arising and passing away, leaving their original source unchanged…”

“Religion is endless, let’s go making science.”

“This is so wrong it’s excellent, but if it’s how someone ever conceived this frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage... Maybe it will tell well the tale of the boy who hallucinates the Frier because of a worm in his heart. Well then: this card here contains the young Emperor’s death-poem, even though it is against the rites for anyone to ever read it. You now possess everything you need.”

She left with no further word.

-6-

In the case of the female child the task is more difficult, for it must transcend an image of its own sex.

So she went there, to a pretty place in the woods. Nickie naked in painted patterns, head shaved in patterns, bead belts around her, the Sidhe Anklet of Palantenna and some other jewelry, gone to that place for the ritual which she had to do. The ritual may not be spoken of, not too much, just allusion to mushrooms, ginger, pistachios, roots, blowfish, moss. An emblematic Hunt. There was unfair slaying of beings that could never grasp the point of the ritual. There was politically incorrect symbolism, especially wielding the concept of purity that is very undemocratic, xenophobic and anti-egalitarian, to be sure. It wasn’t nice. Which is not to say Nickie didn’t enjoy it.

Earlier she had performed certain bureaucratic scorched earth acts that many would find bewildering. But the ritual was not pagan, although the part performed in the pretty place of the woods might have caused one to think otherwise; the way the Sidhe Anklet of Palantenna interfaced the telluric forces had much in connection with the concept of li (理); of that side of the ritual, it suffices to quote Jinshu:

When the actions of the emperor correspond with the measured motions of the heavens, when his ceasing to act coincides with the meaning of the earth, and when this alternation naturally and easily follows the dao – then the stars of the Wudi (五帝) constellation in the Taiwei (太微) enclosure shine with all their brilliance.

The part in the woods, in that great place she chose there, that was more straightforward if you believe there is an encompassing process of ‘dying each other’s life, living each other’s death’. If you believe in arousing defiant vitality in oneself to boast to decay: no, ‘not with the fire in me now’. And also in the moment of wistful surrendering, nay, bare acknowledgement of decay, such as in a ‘Tonight we’ll pick the flowers together, my dear’. Sacred time. That stuff.

Until finally everything was perfectly ruined and haunted and ready for her to stand in the beautiful, fucking beautiful bit of the woods she chose, and ready for the Hsieh Ngao song:

~*~

Wind-Tossed Dragons

The shadows of the cypresses

On the moonlit avenue

To the abandoned palace

Weave in tangles on the road

Like great kelp in the depths of the sea.

When the palace was full of people

I used to see this all the time

And never noticed how beautiful it was.

Mid-Autumn full moon, the luminous night

Is like a boundless ocean. A wild

Wind blows down the empty birds’ nests

And makes a sound like the waves of the sea

In the branches of the lonely trees.

~*~

After which she read:

~*~

He rode a train all the way back to the beginning of the universe

And love had begun there all along.

It doesn't mean nothing was ever accomplished;

His eyes were a different shade this time around,

There was more love between him and the Tao this time around.

~*~

That was it. The elves were all around her. First Critic Ninqueriel, their leader, before her, smiling.

Then in a quantum leap there was a sword through Nicolette’s heart. It was narrow-bladed, beautiful and sleek and white, as if designed by Apple and named the Estoque Puro, as it was. Ninqueriel then took it out and flicked its stain onto the grass while the dragon collapsed.

Her bedchamber-guard had found, brought and sacrificed Pyrite to her as well in the brief time while she watched the birds. It had almost looked like a rescue from Nevin & co. until that part.

She began playing her sword, modulating the plohrmuxic telluric frequencies just released from Ticine and Halak. Her retinue smiled softly.

She unmasked the fake plurality of beings. First Krystal stood before her, while somewhere else in the universe the Tinfoil Lady (as the phenomenon was called) melted into quicksilver. Ninqueriel let out a barely noticeable exhalation (a gasp? sigh?). She then spoke for the first time in a long while, “When I had foreseen the fairest one my prophecy failed to do you justice. I am humbled.”

Open-mouthed, confused and coy, the one newly brought to life was as if frozen.

Then Wernher was beside her. He took stock of those around him coolly, and held Krystal’s hand. There was clanging within his breast.

The elves were delighted to watch them a few moments before disappearing into the sky.

“Is everything in the world so easily mended? I always felt so,” murmured Krystal with her face buried against his chest.

“At which point many will doubt anything is worth doing. But I don’t.” He held her tightly.

-7-

Pragmatically, representation in belated poetry works to remind us of what we may never have known, yet need to believe we have known.

**…unless, of course…

Unless many plot strings went by resonating even if unheeded amid all those references and mystical digressions. All those quotes.

If all along, all along, someone were not playing by the rules of a story as people like them.

If someone, doing the same as the person in the tower in the painting in the Crying of Lot 49 who was weaving a tapestry that spilled out of the window and built the whole landscape she was in, but instead was unweaving their world-tale from inside.

Ninqueriel stood there beside the angel that had taken the original Gauss from her.

The angel showed the First Critic a From Wren card. “A great love failed once. This card embodies the whole story. One of my best works.”

Then sprung from the card, vQ was also there, the one prophesized to be the instrument of her revenge. The only one who could.

The angel yawned.

“I give up my revenge,” said Ninqueriel.

If the other two were ever surprised, that was it.

“Wernher and Krystal. They make it insignificant. Your terrorist organization, what was it called?”

“Pistachio Tomorrow,” said vQ. One would know this from short entries in a journal. Perhaps someone paid attention.

“Yeah, that. I need you to contact Aninha (was that it?) to transmit the motto to the dreamer. Maybe an epistemological phantom in the machine dream can give it a reason to wake.”

“When the going gets tough, wake up. Was that it?” vQ sighed. “But the dreamer… she’s not in PT jurisdiction. It’d be against the rules to contact her.”

“You don’t know Syne and his subvertible clauses and loopholes. Max gave me a note from Syne saying his niece has heard Song For Coati. Max has arranged that. Max is in every group. Even PT, even Breque.”

“Everyone’s in Breque.” vQ sighed again. “Well, the song makes her ours. You want this instead of your revenge. The Angel of Loss of Love will go free and unpunished forever. This is your last chance to choose otherwise.”

“No, I’m fine.

As flowers are brilliant but fall,

who could remain constant in our world?

Today let us transcend the high mountain of transience,

and there will be no more shallow dreaming, no more drunkenness.”

The evil angel kisses her on the cheek. Tears roll. The three leave, vQ last. His co-PT-er brings about the hypostasis of Damocles, as explained earlier, into Damaso.

Still blood-anointed Damaso, who steps from a depth of ice, steps from behind Moebius and hits him in the head with a plank while mumbling an inaudible curse, killing him and all the infinity of other Moebiuses, a plank drifting upstream all the way up to the OverMoebius. The way his presence crisscrossing history is redeemed is like playing a lullaby on the radio to a dying race or the decay of a thorough network of tapeworms. They’re gone from this story. In this story they have lost. ‘Believe, for it is written.’ Damaso is, after all, God from the Pyramid.

He sighs, saying, “…the highest grade of reality is only reached by signs…”

Max asks him, “What next?”

“I will end the chapter soon and then die off these pages forever, passing jurisdiction to That Will End.”

“What about everyone else?”

“There’s still Kara and Nevin and Joel and that other hypostasis of Damocles. There is Klot fallen unconscious right there, his humanity (of sorts) slowly returning now Moebius is dead; the reverse of a snake bite; he’s died one of his lives in the stars, but there are so many of them and each so far away. Here is the Rocket, ready to provide omnipotence to whoever chooses to wield it, if anyone finds a use for that, if anyone wants to remake the universe to their desire. I don’t imagine you want it for yourself?”

“Good heavens, no, I’m completely insane and should be kept away from dangerous things.”

Eçaraia steps forth almost timidly in view of the recent crisis. “There’s still my Unwritten Ones devouring all. Moebius almost left an indelible mark in my waters. In a way I will miss him until I forget him.”

“There’s always your you-ohs. So I imagine there is still enough catastrophe for future days to wrap up. My kind lady Eçaraia, the Demiurgarch has come to slap your wrists as much as those of Anaxerretibes, Trdrt and the others, so you won’t be interfering directly anymore.”

She nods. “My children will do what is inevitable. I am patient, and gladly out of all this. Will be waiting right after the end to gobble it all up.” Exit oblivion.

“It’s all up to the people from this universe now.”

Max looks around at the carnage. Mickey the Cod had been there on a date, the poor fellow. “As it always should have been, some might say.”

“Maybe. It’d have been a whole different story.”

“I’m retiring, too. Joining Syne at the Temple. I had a bad time lately. I still don’t know if I really loved that one third of you.”

“Anything that stands is always at least one third doubt. Have a good forever. I’ll be joining you after some last matters to be overseen.” Damaso looks around at the decimated patrons of the Kakamora – either light or stone had been too much for their mortal shells. Looks around at the crater in the now-haunted ruins of Nova Zona. Who will arrive first to the Rocket? He struggles to care, moving on. On and away.

-8-

A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.

Ninqueriel appeared at Valendil’s ship. Time had passed and it was earlier.

“How wonnen was the regne of Femenye! Some day for looking at you, kid.” He stood up from in front of the streaming cube, raised a cup of wine, but his lips were pale. “Darling Nickie found you, then.”

“Actually better than a dream, am I not? Incredible, I know. You’re a good boy. I feel like returning her. What’s one more change, after all.”

She stabbed herself in the stomach, she raised her bloodied sword to her lips and started playing.

Valendil was almost at a loss for words. “I thought it would have to be dragon juice, eh.”

“You outgrow that type of thinking eventually.”

Soon she was gone, soon the one in Valendil’s arms was the dragoness Ticine waking to a bloody kiss.

“What—how—did I succeed?”

“We both knew you would as soon as you set your steel-will to it. Although I have no idea what that success amounts to, but knowing goes all the way.”

Nickie smiled. “If I did fulfill my half of the story, and we know I did even if the details are hazy, we need to check on King Omnibus and his companions. Why are you crying?”

~*~

It was later than that part. Kara and Nevin and Damocles were worrying* over Klot’s disappearance in a burst of Black Fire when some crazy elves teleported in and dragged Pyrite away. Then they were worrying* about that when Miriam gave a shout in Damocles’ voice and fell to her knees holding her head.

“I’ve… I’ve been cut off from the pangnostic matrix. I’ve been cut off from myself. I’m stuck here.”

And then they turned on their television and heard an all-too-familiar voice: “Of course, the actual substrate of all-knowing would not be possible if the elves of Palantenna…”

Miriam-Damocles set Nova Zona as next destination with a most un-machine-like string of curses pouring from her lips.

*Alright, Nevin wasn’t exactly ‘worrying’, but he was puzzled. Also entertained. It was exciting for him, bless him. He’s one to laugh when best-laid plans go down the shitter for apparently no good reason.

~*~

It was more or less at the same time as the last part, but definitely later than the one before that.

“There's something we must talk about once you have all rested,” said Nickie. “I have, um, opened the way to Palantenna. I’m not certain of what happens next, but I believe we should go directly to Kubrik to find out.”

They settled down to rest. Oscar turned on the television. It was showing an award show of some kind.

“And now, our next award, for Best Plot To Do Stuff, goes to…”

They watched transfixed. Jon went catatonic when the boar appeared. Valendil, thinking back to a puppet show thousands of years earlier, with a sigh turned the ship towards Nova Zona.

THE END of CHAPTER 32

 

 

Prelude to What is Done in Lieu of Cessation

-1-

Fiction has grown odious to the writers; it sickens them; they have lost faith in its necessity and therefore have become atheists of their own omnipotence. No longer do the writers believe that when they say, "Let there be light," genuine radiance dazzles the reader.

There was another chapter 32 once; it was simple and egoless like Augustus Pablo’s music; it was all set inside a bedroom and with only one character. But the character often heard the rain falling outside and longed for it; he never did go, never did raise the blinds to watch the rain; and although there were blazing golden cloudscapes and mirror-like watery surfaces outside, the season of rain ended and the character had not left his bedroom. The desert began leaking out of the character, as if by osmosis, to drown the world in drought. The desert poured mightily from his eyes, and there was less and less desert inside; nothingness gave way to multitudes, a hollow of plenty; ghosts multiplied inside him and he felt all alone without his loneliness, but it was too late. The world took away his desert for itself, and left him with only a teeming jungle, a crowded metropolis of ten thousand roles, ten thousand narratives, ten thousand denouements. His story was no longer elegant and could not be told in a few brushstrokes: he had to accept unwanted refugees as guests, and share with them his scarce protagonism. There was not enough to go around and he had to go without; he finally disappeared from the story altogether, but the most inspired mystics of this chapter remember (dimly, through a myth darkly) and pay homage to the god who was eaten so that their world could exist.

 

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