Understood them?
Perhaps some phrases here, some few lines there. But he had read every word of the carefully chronologized and annotated (by Merivon’s nephew) text!
He blinked.
The cube fell from his horny palm back into the carton. He stuck his hand down inside to retrieve it, to find out what it was, indeed, he had read. The cube he pulled out now announced on its black faces in white hieroglyphs: The Mantichorio, the epic narrative whose origin had been a subject of scholarly debate since the first incomplete copy had been discovered by the second wave of colonists in an abandoned outpost on the site of modern-day Kingston-prime, left by some of the first colonial wave sixty years before (again, the thirty-thousand-word introduction): Were its great battles between the winged monsters and the children, its radioactive treasures in the sunken, red-walled caves through which rushed foaming black rivers, a fantasy of this world or a more realistic narrative surreptitiously brought here from some other? The 207 Cantos of the poem itself? (Cantos 199, 201, and half of 202 had been irretrievably lost in the early At-Man Devastations; Cantos 71, 72, and 73 only existed in the prose summaries that had survived the Censorship Acts of ’87.) What he knew, however, was that, out of the 137,000 lines of alternating heptameters and hexameters that were now an immediate part of his memory, the Nu-7 poet had consciously (or unconsciously) rewritten more than a dozen phrases from it into her own poems.
He scrabbled for another cube, hoping he’d find the first one but pulled out instead The Sharakik Years, a compilation of letters, documents, and diaries of people around the outlaw Ky Sharakik, who had roamed and robbed the disputed territories between the Forb Geosector and Hykor Canyon – from its description, it must have been the chasm he’d once shot through! The 260,000 words of biographical commentary that Redyh Snurb-Nollins, who’d compiled and edited the three volumes, had interspersed among the documents, told a jaw-dropping tale of the exploits of the five-foot, white-haired, seventeen-year-old Sharakik, who’d amassed her gang of seven- and eight-foot criminals from the rejected dregs of several cloning projects that had been instituted in the early days by the Yellows as part of a later abandoned population push. Sharakik herself, illiterate, probably psychotic (though in the last months she had sent more than three dozen extraordinarily eloquent letters to the Ferawan Senate, which she had dictated to the second-rate poet Seb-Voy, who had recently joined the gang and who, numerous commentators still felt, was the actual author of at least some of them), had finally been captured, had been tortured, had been ultimately killed at age twenty by the Yellows’ ‘Grey Group’ – though for years afterwards a myth had persisted that she’d been torn apart by her own rebellious gang before they scattered among the new cities, a myth that had only been exploded by the researchers of Sargu-4, Redyh Snurb-Nollins’ immediate predecessor.
When he plunged his hand in again, he was looking equally for the first-rate Vro Merivon as for the second-rate Seb-Voy, but came up with The Lyrikz of Megel B’ber, which baffled him, because they were brief, beautiful, elegant, and more or less comprehensible, with few words or references he did not understand – because the last three tomes he’d managed to absorb (which were also the first three things he’d ever read which were not delivery instructions) had, among their thousands of sentences, managed to use most of the same words and grammatical constructions. He still found himself catching his breath: the scant sixty pages of the ninety-seven-year-old B’ber’s Lyrikz, in that tense and quiet voicing that seemingly made any object named shimmer so in his mind, were the most beautiful things he’d ever read! And he had read so much …! Another cube: he read through the classic stories of Relkor, with their astute observations of technocratic life in the Jamhed Complex and their underlying note of surreal horror. Another: he read the Metropolitan Edition of the novels of Sni Artif – Wind (’15), Road (’17), To the Black River (’20; in Chapter VII of which he learned, in the conversation of the tall girls and short boys who defied their teachers to indulge in long, drugged conversations behind the plastic sand-carts in the evening, that, though many people talked about it, unlike him, almost no one ever actually read the whole of The Mantichorio), Sand (’22), Air (’22), and Time (’24). Sni Artif, he learned in the afterword to the first novel (the fact then repeated in the introductions to each of the following volumes), had eventually committed suicide by burying himself in the dunes of the Nyrthside Range, before what turned out to be a futile and easily repelled attack of the Meyth in ’28. And the next cube was, oddly enough, Kysu Jerzikiz’s The Sands, a famous memoir written at about the same time as Artif’s Sand, but on the other side of the world, about the exploration of the intra-geosectral divides, during which some of the most famous technological infrasystems had been discovered, some of which, the afterword explained, had been recently disrupted because of later human development as the equatorial population belt had begun to close on itself. He read the seven-volume psychoanalytic biography of Hardine, the legal philosopher whose work had been so influential in the organization of the Vresht Federation, which, only thirty years ago, had included twelve geosectors. Towards the beginning of volume three (Years of Noon: ’92–’01) he learned the full story of the deep friendship between Hardine and Vro Merivon; it had been Hardine who had, after Merivon’s death in ’95, rescued the poems from Nu-7 and overseen their first publication. He read Okk’s incendiary odes of jealousy and ennui, Hermione at Buthrot, apparently written off-world, which had supplied as many allusions for B’ber as The Mantichorio had for Merivon. He read the complete extant work of the twenty-two-year-old prodigy Steble, her five, multicharacter dialogues, the handful of papers on algebraic agrammaticalities, the surviving fragment of her journal for the ’88–’89 concert season, and the final impassioned letters, sent from her deathbed in the disease-infested Jabahia Prison complex, to her old teacher, Seb-Voy – the same Seb-Voy who, ten years later, would go off to fight alongside Sharakik between Forb and the Hykor. He read Gorebar’s thirteen dazzling Sketches – and read, in the introduction to that volume for perhaps the fifth time now (somehow it had come up in the introductions to a number of other books as well), about the nine other volumes of verse Gorebar had published, all of which were completely pedestrian and without writerly value – which only made him plunge his hand down among the cubes again, in hope of finding one of those nine so that he might read them for himself.
And came up instead with Byrne’s Marking/Making, her three-quarter-of-a-million-word experimental novel, a cascade of names, numbers, isolate phrases, and single hieroglyphs that created a kind of hypnotic, sensual experience in itself, unrelated to anything he had read before, but which, as much as any other affect now inscribed behind the bone of his forehead, had been clearly produced by the reading. Blinking, he placed that cube carefully back in the carton and picked up … Wevin’s classical cycle of twenty-six novels, written over half that number of years, until her death by fire in the printing plant where she moulded cold type: Scenes on the Capitals. The opening three books, the introduction informed him, had been widely popular since their initial publication, though the middle cycle of seven were as unread as any great works from The Mantichorio to Marking/Making. But one after another the tales inscribed themselves across his mind’s eyes, ears, hands, volume on volume. In six of them, he was surprised to find, the tragic hero or heroine ended by going to the Radical Anxiety Termination Institute; and the narrative of the third from last turned on the abduction of a young man who was illegally made a rat and then rescued by some well-meaning social workers three years later. He read Demazy’s series of tender and distanced novellas and a collection of the first three powerful novels by Horeb, who he knew now from some other introduction was a pseudonym for Saya Artif (a second cousin of Sni, though they had never met), a younger disciple of Byrne’s. Indeed, he found himself recognizing, in her stripped-down sentences with their sudden grammatical lurches (was this an analogue of what Steble had meant by agrammaticality
…?), the same sentence forms that had run through Marking/Making. There, of course, almost wholly a-referential, in Horeb they were used to describe, with glimmering exactitude, dawn forays out from the early spaceports across the equatorial dunes, or evening fires below the awnings of the dark transport machines parked about the newly sunk foundations of the Selm Chain of urban complexes. (For almost three decades in the previous century, the introduction commented, Horeb could arguably have been ranked as the most popular writer in this world.) While he put that cube down to pick up another, he wondered if the similarity marked the success or the failure of Byrne’s experiment …
He had just finished a six-volume set, Classics of World Philosophy (selections from the major works of Tondi, Fordiku, as well as the complete proceedings of the Vedrik School, Seminars and Publications for the years ’82–’89), when she said: ‘I know you can do it at that speed now –’ (He looked up because she had touched his shoulder—) ‘but I want you to stay sane so that you can appreciate some of the things I want to do later.’ Her fingers moved against his neck. ‘Stand up, now. Come. Come with me.’ He stood – the pains in his knees that came with squatting over the last years still surprised him.
Had it been days he’d squatted? Or hours?
In the dim light she looked at him with a kind of bland approval. Suddenly her face twisted. Her full lips puckered. ‘Phttt!’ Saliva struck his cheek, the corner of his lip. At the same time she grasped his shoulders, thrust him out so that the back of his heel hit the carton. He heard cubes fall over cubes. Then she pulled him against her. ‘Yes …’ she whispered. ‘Yes, the look on his face – your shock, your shame, your humiliation, your revulsion, your astonishment … I don’t know. It does something to me. Breaks my heart, I suppose.’
He’d felt no shock, no revulsion, only the mildest of sympathetic pains above his buttocks at the sudden standing, the slightest surprise at her action, the faintest curiosity at her motivation. Over her shoulder, he reached up to wipe his jaw with the hard heel of his hand –
‘Come.’ She released him, stepping back. ‘No, don’t wipe it off. Let it dry there. Come, come with me now.’ Holding his wrist, she led him back towards the instruments. ‘Tell me, what have you been reading at so diligently for the past three minutes?’
‘I …?’ Perhaps, unlike the Institute’s gamma lasers, the glove did change who you were. He certainly did not feel like the same person he’d been … three minutes ago? Years and monsters and ages and cultures and kilometres and feelings ago? ‘I read Sand and The Sands and Lyrikz …’ and when he’d recited a dozen more titles, she stopped him with a laugh. Sitting in the driver’s seat, she laid both hands on the thrust rod. She must have stopped the transport while he’d been crouched at the carton.
Outside, on low, headlights lay dim orange over sand and pebbles.
‘What a strange view of world culture you must have!’ She leaned forward and shook her head. ‘When I was packing those, I called myself taking all the important, profound, and indispensable titles I could – nearly filled the box. But one of the more eccentric librarians at the internment compound I’d gotten permission to riffle had put up a whole shelf full of cubes of women writers or texts about women. She was convinced nobody could be truly educated unless they’d read them – though nobody I ever met had, except her, maybe. Anyway.’ She pressed another pedal again. Outside, headlights brightened. ‘I decided I might as well take those too, as a lark, and loaded the box up with cubes from her special shelf. I’m afraid they were the top three inches in the carton. From the titles, it sounds to me like that’s what you got stuck in!’
‘But…’ he began.
She pushed the thrust bar. The transport lurched on into desert night.
‘But Horeb – Saya Artif –’ he said, ‘was the most famous writer … in the world.’ He added: ‘For almost thirty years,’ and felt odd making a contestatory statement about his world; till now it had never occurred to him he’d had one.
‘She may well have been,’ the woman said. ‘But that thirty years was many years ago. You can be sure: most people today haven’t even heard of her – which I suppose was my eccentric librarian friend’s point in putting that shelf together in the first place. You say you can drive this. I want you –’ She leaned forward and punched a lot of buttons below the e-output meter – ‘to get me to these coordinates.’ She frowned. ‘Can you?’
He leaned forward to look at the numbers that had appeared on the locale screen. ‘No …’ The coordinates were six-figured ones, and the only system he was used to from the Muct was the two-figured one for finding your way around within a city. But, certainly, it must work more or less the same way as the two-figure system. ‘Yeah.’ Coordinates were coordinates. He could figure them out. ‘I can.’
‘Good.’ She slipped from her seat. ‘Then I’m going to sleep, in the back.’
He slid over on to the driver’s plush cushion and, with gloved and naked hand, took the bar.
He drove for an hour or more and did not look back because, finally, he had not changed very much from who he had been before. Then – once – he did, because he was curious about where she was sleeping, and curiosity was, in itself, a curious emotion and, now, nowhere near as frightening as it had once been.
She’d pulled out a piece of canvas and lay on it, on the plastic flooring, snoring, one canvas corner pulled over her shoulder: a bed, he thought, harder than sand.
The town was one of those old-fashioned attempts at ecological self-sufficiency in a world with no ecology to begin with. The description was not his, but had been written by an offworld woman a hundred years ago to describe her entrance at dawn into a town more than four thousand kilometres east. Recalling it, however, made him want to look out the transport window more clearly. (It also made him want to return to the carton.) This town was five observation towers – and places where, no doubt, a sixth and seventh, now fallen or pulled down, had stood – with forests of grey-green elephant lichen between.
Dawn streaked green and blue behind them under a dark red sky, still awaiting day’s orange. On the locale screen, the first four mobile coordinates had closed with the stasile ones she’d punched out last night. They rolled in on a worn road walled with wire mesh to hold the lichens’ wrinkled hides back from the shoulder. He watched the delta discrepancy in the last two figures decrease.
Above, on high trestles, great translucent plates would cast down their blue or red or green light on to the rippling vegetation later in the day. He had seen them as a child in the great city parks in which, from time to time, he’d slept. It was only a little surprising to look at them now and know, for the first time (because Seb-Voy had once explained their workings to Sharakik), what they were for – though now the light slipped under them, rather than fell through, to put copper trim on the raddled edges of the barky growths.
Delta dropped from twelve to eleven, which meant their destination should be visible in another minute.
Through the side window they passed a yard stacked with wrecked transports like the one he drove. Out the window across, he glimpsed an acre-wide silt-vat, through which crusted mixers spattered back and forth in the organic slush. He rolled over a stretch of road gouged about with kids’ graffiti, as were many roads in the southeastern geosectors. He had seen such things before – old transport yards, roadway graffiti – in the much larger cities in which he’d grown up; but now, because the Nu-7 poet had written a poem comparing the passion of young love to a blind child’s exploring such a junked transport lot, and because the villain of Sand had drowned the enraged clone-dogs in such a silt-vat, and because Fordiku, on a dawn not so different from this, when hiking out of Kingston, had stopped to talk to an adolescent girl busy cutting graffiti in the road just like the ones which, moments ago, had made the transport treads go thump, and from the encounter had begun to construct her time-and-text theory that had dominated – well, not all of world philosophy, but at least one narrow, acade
mic strand of it for nearly a century, he saw them not as so flat and so unknown you could not even call them puzzling, but rather as historical and curious, specific and resonant.
The delta dropped from two to one and began to roll down through point nine, point eight, point seven …
The plaza entrance he pulled through was littered with desert slough, even this far in. Acrylic greens and yellows chipped or lapped loose from peeling advertisement statues. The transport halted on asphalt covered with large red circles, indicating parking. (At Muct, it had been small white ones, but that was in another geosector, in another part of … his world.) He sat a long time, looking out the scarred sandshield.
A bank of mobile lichen furled and unfurled slowly below the chin of a woman’s giant head, cast from some sort of flesh-toned ceramic. Panels of coloured metal hung before her. Now and then one, turning on its cable, revealed a smile’s corner, a great nostril’s curve, an eye’s iris.
A tall old man stood in a doorway whose metal hinges, even from here, looked loose. His naked chest was snarled with white hair. His brown head, within a circle of white, was bald. Over the next ten minutes he picked and prodded and pulled at the wires that, twisted together, made up his belt buckle, till his pants fell to his ankles. He stepped from them, looked till he found the green rag he must have hung on the door handle minutes before, and, trying to tie it across his face, stumbled unsteadily across the yard, to disappear among the signs.