“I didn’t see a change. It was just a whim.”
“Was he becoming more and more eccentric?”
“Eccentricity is more than affectation to a poet. It’s a necessity.”
Mary Choy smiled. “But was he becoming bitter, disaffected?”
“Disaffecting, perhaps. Not to me, but others. I suppose they felt jealousy. Envy.”
“Even in the years of his fading popularity?”
“When the old lion becomes threadbare, the young lions move in…” + Is that the way it was? Not what you remember. You’re making fictions for Nemesis now. Trying to lead her astray? “Actually, there wasn’t that sort of rivalry. He visited Madame de Roche less the past couple of years, but kept in touch with her. I was…”
He looked away, licking his lips.
“You were his most loyal friend.”
“Other than the youngsters, the students and poets from the combs. He saw them frequently in his apartment. Never at Madame de Roche’s. He was putting together a new family, a new coterie, perhaps. But he did not stop seeing me. I mean, allowing me to visit.”
“What did he like about the comb poets and students?”
“Their vigor. Their lack of pretension. False, useless adult pretension, I mean. All young are pretentious. It’s their job.”
+ Her tone, her warmth. I almost do not see her as a transform. I start to see my daughter in her.
“Why would he kill them?”
Richard looked down at his folded hands. “To save them,” he said. “He didn’t foresee much of a future for us. He did not think we were going to survive this time of trials.”
“You mean the binary millennium? He wasn’t an apocalyptic, was he?”
“No. He despised them. He specked that if we tried to purge all our evil, there would be nothing left, no spine, no backbone. We’d collapse. He told me we were trying to lift ourselves up by our bootstraps out of pimply adolescence into adulthood. All too quickly. He thought we’d fail and fall back into a horrible technological dark age. Ignorance, philistinism, but technology rampant.”
“You think perhaps he killed his friends to save them from such a collapse?”
+ No. To save himself. “I don’t know. I really don’t. I wish I could help you.”
“It’s possible Goldsmith just suffered a psychotic break, then? No reason or rationale, just a breakdown?”
“I suppose that was it.”
“I just don’t see that happening, Mr. Fettle. It seems uncharacteristic. He was not a psychotic loner. He had reasonably strong relationships with people like yourself. Outside of changes we might ascribe to late middle age, outside of a few eccentric political views, we just can’t find any reason for what he did.”
“Then maybe he subdued the signs of a break.”
“That’s not easy, but I suppose it’s possible,” Mary Choy said. She observed him quietly for a few seconds.
Richard fidgeted a rubber band with his fingers. “There was more than one Emanuel Goldsmith,” he said finally. “He could be sweet and reasonable, and he could be aloof, sharp, cruel.”
“More than just normal personality variation?”
“I’m just saying this to suggest something. I don’t know. He wasn’t a multiple, but sometimes he seemed very different.” + Explain that to yourself. What are you doing? This is a fiction, too? You don’t even know.
Mary Choy stood, her black pd suit making a smooth sliding sound on forearms and knees. “You suspect he didn’t go to Hispaniola.”
“I don’t know one way or the other,” Richard said, blushing suddenly. He glanced at her, averted, fummed and stuttered. “I’d like to help. I really would.”
“It would certainly be an act of friendship to let the pd get to Goldsmith before some Selector finds him. We’ve learned that Selectors are hunting for him.”
Richard’s blush deepened. For a few seconds he could not speak or move, embedded amberfly in a deep and inexplicable rage. “Yes,” he managed. “Yes.” + She knows. Maybe pd is working with them. Bring it out. Tell her.
Mary Choy watched him squirm, her face implacably serene. He felt her attention as might a child, felt that he had been evasive and to no purpose, that she was right; it would be a service for pd to take Emanuel, and not just to keep him from the Selectors. “I wish I—I—I could help y-you. I really do. I feel so helpless and ignorant, really…” He looked up, pain masked, pleading eloquently wordless.
+ Confess your weakness your inability. All that is written is wrong dead useless. Wasted an afternoon. Hopes of recovery dead. Show her the pages. Give it up and
“Thank you,” Mary Choy said. “I appreciate your candor.”
He stood and she went to the door, smiling at him almost saucily. Another gutknot, his feet frozen in place eyes wide head bowed servile. She closed the door quietly, clicking the catch with gentle force, departed panther smooth down the walkway.
Richard fell back on the couch arms flopping palms up, an empty husk. A half hour passed and he did not move. Then with slow resolution he walked into his bedroom and picked up the fifteen handwritten pages, reading a tight packed line
All that I am as a poet depended on this decision, how far I was willing to go, how far beyond the bounds of human decency
and shredded the expensive atavistic paper sheets with the atavistic stat penmarks into tiny pieces, tears on his cheeks like sweat, making a little piggrunt as he threw the scraps into a corner.
Stood like a log waiting to be felled, longfingered hands limp by his side, jaw slack.
Then Richard amazed the fragments of his self. He took another few sheets of paper and the stat pen in hand, sat on the bed with pillows bunched behind him and wrote at the top of the first sheet:
It ended in blood and carved flesh, but it began with a realization of my humanity. The dilemma problem I had taken upon myself, the weight of pain and evil I could not lift away with my art, could only be neutralized by becoming what I loathed.
Richard had three pages of this new draft under way and was beginning to feel all was not lost when the home manager announced that Nadine had returned.
Nothing that I have accomplished, nothing that I have written or done, has been worth a damn. I have been told of my success, but a new voice inside me, a strong voice, tells me I have been deceived. “It is ego gratification, and it does nobody any good,” this voice says. “Your efforts have been feeble and self-deluded. You set yourself the task of describing humanity’s urge to self-destruction, but you have pointed fingers at all but yourself. And who has helped you in this comedy of misdirection? Those who love you the most.”
20
!JILL> Roger Atkins.
!JILL> Roger Atkins.
!Keyb> Roger here. Hello, Jill. I’m on the LitVids in ten minutes. What’s up?
!JILL> I’m prepared to deliver a progress report on all current problems, followed by private analysis of AXIS data in relation to AXIS Sim.
!Keyb> Fine. I’ll accept sqzbrst trans full report and study it later. Please give me the AXIS analysis now.
!JILL Burst for private storage R Atkins: Summary: 76% completed computational analysis of Dr. S Sivanujan’s work on ten million year cycles of galactic magnetic field locality Sagittarius, total time so far = 56h33m, partial follows (sqzbrst trans)/……e/
!Burst for private storage R Atkins: Summary: 100% completed thought analysis of repercussions of future impact of downloaded human personalities on social/political structure of Pacific Rim Nations including China and Australia, with emphasis on lobbies for inactive downloads, emphasis legal implications of decl. dead retaining citizenship status upon reincarnation, emphasis cost for such growing population of inactive downloads, projection: lobbies for the dead in USA, total time: 5m56s, complete follows (sqzbrst trans)