That library cloth was his pride. He loved it, loved the way it caught the light, loved its flexibility and ruggedness and memory capacity.
He did not like the way it stung.
He remembered that the kitchen stool was between the hearth-cell and the window. The hearth-cell gave light and heat to the kitchen, fueled the upright stove, and fed the cable that led to the barn where the cream-separator hummed. The window, which had come from his grandmother’s house in Austin, was an antiseptic permeable surface that even when open changed the smell of the forest and flowers outside into something that stung in the nose. In those days, the Pestilence of the Jihad was still within living memory, and grandfathers with breathing plugs in either nostril still showed callow youths the scars where their disease-ridden lung tissue had been removed.
Over that stool in the kitchen he bent, beneath his grandmother’s funny-smelling window. His mother’s arm rose and fell as she spoke in her dispassionate, precise voice, and each exclamation point was another stroke. “Will you yet defy me, child? My rules are clear! You are to have no pixies, no streams, no games!” This meant text only could be stored in his schooling; no visual or audio files, no interactives: only books.
“The horrid noise you call music must go,” she said. “Music shapes the soul, and misshapen music misshapes it. No idle story-files; lectures and tests and text I allow, nothing else!”
“What about Shakespeare?” When she was done, he spoke. His voice was quivering with sobs, but even young as he was, pain did not make him hold his tongue. “Dad would have liked it. He’s scholarly, Shakespeare. Anglos and Noreastermen read Shakespeare! I can store a play, can’t I? See the costumes, spy the actors?”
“Spy the actresses, I deem. I would be more inclined to credit your uncharacteristic interest in the classics, were there not a program here for reproportioning Ophelia. Are we taking up the study of anatomy? No, I think not. Text is what you will read, and you will learn to exercise your imagination, even if you are the only member of your generation to do so. Were I able to beat an imagination into your brain with a strap, my arm would not tire night and day, I warrant you, child of mine.”
For some reason, it always unnerved him when she called him “child of mine”—as if he were livestock, something that belonged to her, not him.
She gave him one last lash across his back, “to help to concentrate him” and muttered, “You already dispute as well as any lawyer: were it not that I see the fire of genius in you, such as comes but once a generation, I would take this whole library from you, and raise you as unlettered as any Migrant. Go ahead, glare at me! It is your father’s glare; I would not beat it out of you.”
Still holding back his tears, he stood straight and held out his hand, and asked his mother politely for his library.
He clutched the shimmering fabric in his little fists, seeing the icons of his music files floating in the cloth. Menelaus stood breathing in and out, not crying, but not moving his fingers toward the control spots either. For a moment, he did nothing. His mother stared down at him, silent and sardonic as an old gallows tree. She did not bother to speak, but waited.
So much time, so much effort, had gone into finding those files! Everything he had scalped or smuggled in from friend’s libraries, or swapped with the rough-looking Oddifornians who lazed around Belle’s Bar, betting on cockfights, never working. His brother Achilles said he would catch ailment from the dirty Oddlings, and he didn’t know if Achilles meant a file bug or a bioterror bug.
Once Menelaus did Sam Feckle’s wood-chopping chores for a week, just to get the full-length variable-output version of a dance tune he heard floating from a tiny plug in Sam’s ear during Meeting, when Sam should have been hard praying. All that work, for nothing, now.
All his tunes, his precious songs and jingles, ringadings and roundelays, gavottes and jigs, flickered and vanished on the screen as Mother watched him reluctantly scratching the little icons, one by one, into oblivion. She did not tell him to select and delete the whole lot with one finger-stroke. She just watched.
Some of the Mexican and Injun music, the ranchera and corrido, the garifuna and Ghost-Dance, the jazz and buy-me jingles for the Gambler Princes was stuff to make his heart rise up like a lark, beating its wings in the dawn-beams while the world below was still black: that was what the music was to him, or Paynim tunes with their lutes and clashing finger-cymbals, buzzing reeds, and wailing were opulent as wine, even if he did not know the words.
There was no kind of song he did not like: Menelaus could see the patterns of the music in his mind. He had a knack to envision the systems of notes and chords into number-expressions and higher-order functions: he could lay with his head on the cloth, stereo-audio coming from different sensitive regions of the fabric, and close his eyes, enter a pure realm where everything was made of numbers. He could soar.
Silently, close-faced, his mother watched while he deleted the music of his life.
It was harder than chores. When he was done with his personal music files, all she said was: “Now the rest of it.”
He knew, he knew, he should not argue with his mother. His elder brother Agamemnon had warned him just the day before, “She wore out all patience and love on us first six boys. Like she’s scraped thin now. She ain’t got nothing left for seven of ten. ’Sides, if she had any left, sure she’d be saving up her carin’ for the young’uns” (meaning his three younger brothers, Socrates, Leonidas, and Pericles, born posthumously from Father’s sperm records at the Army Health Clinic in Lubbock).
Agamemnon had been fated to be named Aristotle, as Mom liked naming her boys after long-dead servicemen, but she turned up her nose when she found out Aristotle ran away where Socrates stood his ground and died in his tracks. Despite having lost out on being named after such a famed thinker, Agamemnon still was held to be pretty cunning among his brothers, and Menelaus thought he should listen.
But he found it was too hard to hold his tongue. He had to argue.
Menelaus was careful to make it sound like he was talking about someone else’s life, someone else’s files, some boy who gave a tinker’s damn about his education, not him. And he picked his battles, defending only what seemed might have some high-class to it.
It seemed to work. Certain music files had been included in the scholastic programming. She relented on Beethoven’s Ninth, on the grounds that it would “serve to better him”; but she would not let him keep The Death of Siegfried, on the grounds that it was “European, dismal, and pagan.”
The picture files all had to go, even famous paintings. Some things he thought would escape, being half and half, but the comic book version of Moby-Dick had to go, as did the 1956 Gregory Peck movie.
“But Mom! This file is flat and deaf!” (Flat, meaning it was non-stereoscopic, and deaf, meaning that the acting styles, music track, and plot ending did not alter according to audience reaction or preference.) “It’s just gotta be educational! It so old!”
He knew he would never actually finish the text version. Some hacker had corrupted the file, and added a lot of boring stuff about cutting up whales.
“Books are education.” She was adamant. “Pictures are entertainment. Education evolves your faculties, and makes the mind like an épée; supple as steel, yet sharp. Entertainment devolves, deadens the wit, and coarsens the taste. Natural selection favors the evolved. Do you understand me? There are in this life the men who make reality, and the men who live in the reality other men make. And what is this? This trash?”
Then the worst had happened. She was pointing at the little icon representing his comic book files. Asymptote. The future. The animated files of his dreams.