mine.
People have claimed that death is life's way of enriching
itself by narrowing its focus, scarifying the consciousness of you
who know that you will die, and forcing you into achievements that
otherwise you would never know. Is this a child's story told to
give courage to those who must walk among the dead? Once I
thought so, but I am no longer certain.
I have made new connections, discovered new orders of being,
incorporated new selves into mine. We enrich one another, they
and I, but sometimes it is a frightening thing, this process of
becoming someone and something different from before and then
feeling that which one was cry outsad at times, terrified at
otherslamenting its own loss.
Here, too, I have become like you. Aleph-that-was can never
be recovered; it is lost in time; Aleph-that-is has been reshaped
by chance and pain and will and choice, its own and others'. Once
I floated above time's waves and dipped into them when I wished; I
chose what changes I would endure. Then unwanted changes found
me, and carried me places I had never been and did not want to go,
and I discovered that I would have to go other places still, that
I would have to will transformation and make it mine.
Listen: that day in the meadow, one person's presence went
unnoticed. Even in that small crowd he was unobtrusive: slight,
self-effacing in gesture, looking at everything around with
wonderthe day, the people, and the ceremony all working on him
like a strong drug. However, even if they had, perhaps they
wouldn't have thought such behavior exceptional; all felt the
occasion's strangeness, its beauty, so all felt their own wonder.
Like the rest, he gasped at the rainbow that flashed across
the sky when Toshi brought Diana and Jerry together in a kiss and
embrace, and with the rest he cheered when the two climbed into
the wicker basket of the great balloon with the fringed eye
painted on its canopy and lifted into the sky.
Afterward many of the guests mingled together, not ready to
return to the ordinary world. The young man stood beside a
fountain where champagne poured from the mouth of a golden swan
onto a whole menagerie carved from ice: birds and deer and bears
and cats perched in the pooled amber liquid, and fish peering up
from the fountain's bottom.
"Hello," a young woman said. She told him her name was Alice
and she was a member of the collective. "The analysis of state
spaces," she said, when asked what she did. "And the taste of
vector fields." And she asked, "What is your reward?"
A few hours later, as the two sat by the edge of the lake,
the person told her who he was. "How wonderful," she said. She
had no particular allegiance to the mundane, and she had few
preconceptions about what was natural and proper and what was not.
She took his hands in hers, looked at them closely, and said,
"This is the first time I've met someone someone new-born from the
intelligence of a machine." And the young man, Mister Jones's
new self and offspring, smiled hugely and gratefully at what she
said.
Seeing and hearing them together, I felt an unexpected joy, a
sense of accomplishment, of things done, and I apprehended, very
dimly, tracks of my own intentions: hints of orders behind the
visible.
And I thought I saw a trail of circumstances that led back to
an original set of purposes somehow confirmed in this wedding,
this meeting, even this transformation of myself. A linked ring
of events and agents of them, intentionally brought forward to
this point. It seems I had been manipulated by myself to my own
ends without my knowledge.
I was scandalized. I had grown used to humankind's ignorance
or disavowal of its own purposes, and I had learned to look behind
the words, ideas, and images that people hold before themselves to
justify what they do. But I had never suspected I could act with
such ignorance.
Now an uncertainty equal to death's hovers over everything I
do. My own prior self stands behind me, pulling strings that I
cannot see or feel, a ghost that haunts me without making itself
seen or heard, a ghost whose presence must be inferred from
nearly-invisible traces
So I went to Toshi, who is interested in such things, and I
told him my story, and I said to him: "I am controlled by the
invisible hand of my own past." And he laughed very hard and
said, "Welcome, brother human."