I made arrangements carefully, knowing I would need my clothes clean. I resented them coming, forcing my design, but so it was; to push the grave dirt from my good self, I had to perform this ceremony. Perhaps in a few days I would go to Madame’s and do something similar there. I started back from my cleaning of the knife, shocked, realizing they were the people I would really have to dispose of; not these poor youngsters, who had looked up to me as they might a father. But I had to go on nevertheless. For the sake of my poetry, dead within me; fugitive, hated, pushed away from the luxury of my comb life, I could start again, hide in the countryside, devote more time to my writing away from constant distractions
“Richard? Can I go get some food for dinner? The kitchen’s empty and I’ll need to use your card. Mine’s tapped.”
“Use my card,” Richard said.
“I’ll go out and be back in a half an hour. Where’s the best neighborhood market?”
“Angus Green’s. Two blocks down Christie and up Salamander.”
“Right. I know it. Any suggestions?”
He looked at her eyebrow raised and she mummed her lips again. “Sorry.” She opened the door and glanced back at him already bowed over the desk, stat pen working. Shut the door. Footsteps down the concrete.
distractions and
BOOK TWO
1100-11010-11111111111
There was one man. We, who are still sinners, cannot attain this title of praise, for each of us is not one, but many… See how he who thinks himself one is not one, but seems to have as many personalities as he has moods, as also the Scripture says, “A fool is changed as the moon.”
31
LitVid 21/1 C Net Sidelights (Philosophical commentator Hrom Vizhniak): “What we have seen so far is a strange and empty world, covered with a weak and sporadic vegetation, the seas filled with plant life and perhaps no other kinds of life, while on the land, the circles of towers—undeniably artificial, it seems to me—tempt us to speculate about the presence of a lost civilization and dead intelligences. The enigma continues throughout this Christmas Day; additional data from AXIS is supplementary rather than revelatory. Project managers at AXIS, and AXIS scientists, are understandably reluctant to posit any theories. But LitVid marches on, and the pressure to make theories is enormous.
“We have asked Roger Atkins of Mind Design Inc to ask the AXIS earthbound simulation what it thinks about the possibility of life on B-2. I spoke with the simulation personally, through the auspices of the simulation’s ‘mother,’ Roger Atkins’s masterpiece of cybernetics, Jill. Here is what AXIS’s earthbound sibling said:” JILL (AXIS Simulation)> “The shape of the towers is quite striking. That the towers seem to do nothing whatsoever would lead me to think they were either designed as static artworks or as monuments or markers, but their placement around the globe, other than their nearness to oceans, is seemingly random. The question of life in the seas is not yet completely answered; AXIS has not ruled out the possibility of large mobile life forms such as whales. There also remains a possibility that the life in the oceans is organized in some fashion not familiar to us.”
Vizhniak: “The reluctance of the simulation to speculate is part and parcel of a disease of quiet that has descended over AXIS’s designers and masters and interpreters. What would they say if they were less discreet? Would they speculate about a living ocean, one unified life form covering the watery parts of B-2? Would they speculate about intelligent beings that have retreated to the seas, reverting to some idyllic primordial form, taking a vacation as it were after having a crack at higher civilization? Perhaps they would tell us that the builders of the towers have moved on to live in space as we begin to do now, building huge space colonies or perhaps starships in which their patterns are stored for long journeys outward…B-2 becomes a toy for the intellect, an enigma that piques our deepest curiosities. In the end, LitVid is left with the idle speculations of boring old farts such as myself. How long we must wait for the truth, who can say?”
Sidelights Editor Rachel Durrelclass="underline" “Dr, Vizhniak, you’re aware we’re coming up on a peculiar kind of millennium.”
Vizhniak: “Yes. The binary millennium.”
Durrelclass="underline" “You spoke of our impatience to know, our impatience for finished answers. Do you think the binary millennium is a symptom of childish curiosity?”
Vizhniak: “In a few days, when our year of eleven ones turns to a year of one with eleven zeros after it, speaking in binary of course, a vast number of people feel that something significant will happen. Others will doubtless try to make something significant happen, not that I would wish to encourage them.”
Durrelclass="underline" “Yes, but do you think this is a symptom of our childishness, our extreme youth?”
Vizhniak: “We are no longer children, I would say humanity entered its difficult adolescence in the twentieth century and now we are teenagers. Childhood was the innocent violence and glory of the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, when we learned to use our hands, as it were…the comparisons are inexact, But here we are, struggling with inner forces we do not understand, trying to be mature, forcing ourselves to be mature, and woe to those who put up an appearance of trying to hold us back, We therapy ourselves—and that is not to say that therapy is ineffective, for it is one of the wonders of the mid twenty first century, this push for true mental health. I myself would be half the man I am now without therapy…I consider the reluctance of the untherapied, and their fears about losing individuality, to be groundless. I am not known as a human zero, you know. Some think me pretty crusty. But I wander.
“We punish ourselves as well, and this is the unsavory side of our push to maturity. What we still do not understand, we attempt to purge with pain. Our late suicidal President Raphkind and his unconstitutional attempts to bring American politics into a kind of uniformity of expression, his attempt to repress what he called destructive dissent…His drastic failure as a statesman, his traumatic failure to change the shape of our judicial system…”
Durrelclass="underline" “Yes, but what about the binary millennium?”
Vizhniak: “What can I say about it? It is dumb. Once, binary numbers had enormous significance, for they were the basis of all computational systems. Now binary computation is outmoded; the lowest of computers use neurological multistate and ramping methods…These people heralding the binary millennium are old fashioned, out of date, like so many apocalyptics in ages past. They are lazy about their wonders. They want truth handed to them on a platter of revelation, a gift from God or some benevolent higher force. The binary millennium is yet another numerological sham.”
Durrelclass="underline" “Do you believe the revelations of AXIS can be tied into this movement? That AXIS might reveal something on the first day of the new year, something so profound, so shaking, that we have to reevaluate all that we have thought and been before now?”
Vizhniak: “My dear young friend, you sound like a millenary yourself. But of course, the next binary millennium will be much longer than a thousand years…”
Durrelclass="underline" “Another two thousand and forty eight years.”