— Oh, names. What do names matter?
— I think they do, Laurence. They tell a story given at birth, creation perhaps, when the primeval atom burst. You know, I suppose, that I favour the Superdense Theory, what they call the Big Bang, not the Steady State?
— Yes indeed. I should know that by now, after all my time here, and your television lectures.
— Ah, you watch those, do you? Well, well, how good of you. Popular, you know, but still.
Professor Head has an undoubted presence on the screen despite his small eyes, one of them almost blind, the other watery. He walks through metal curves and makes spheres spin and plays with atom-rings as with an abacus and in slow close-up twists the plastic beads that thickly coil along the spiral called the thread of life, holding together in a daze of attention the auditorium that curves upwards from him in tiers as the cameras swing their booms away and point the cold precision of their lenses on a spiral galaxy. The others, my rivals, hope to prove the Steady State soon by actually seeing, or perhaps I should say hearing, a hydrogen atom in the creation process. This at the speed of one in the space of a large house every thousand years, to compensate for the recession of the galaxies at the rate observed. Hardly hearable of course. You know what I mean by hearing, don’t you, Laurence. If I showed you a map of the sun as we hear it through the giant telescope it would fill the entire sky. Did you know that?
— I did. My wife –
— Ah yes. Bright girl. She understands all we do, you know, more than most computer-operators I have had working for me.
— Now I remember what I came to ask you. I see people like that. As you see the sun. It hurts. And why? Why me?
But he answers no questions either, except in the curved way of light, like what do the doctors say, oh doctors, I know them too well, nerves, they say, I have said it myself, time heals and things like that, indeed Laurence, you have little faith in your own profession, but then, as a geometrician of the soul which, like the universe, has at least five geometries — geometries? Why professor, I would call them geologies rather, maps of ocean depths, well, it all comes to the same thing you know, like physician, heal thyself, or at any rate continue as if you had, things will come clear later, in the last sentence perhaps which ushers in his junior colleague, Dr Tim Dekko, and his anxiety about promotion wrapped up in a complex equation. With infinite patience and the finite velocity of light Professor Head peels off the geometric series like the skins of an onion to reach a tearful child who makes the professor’s one eye water and says you sit on me.
— My dear good man, why should I sit on you? I have every interest in pushing your work, good work, you know that. And you know it too, don’t you, Laurence? I depend upon it.
— Yes, everyone depends on everyone here. We all go round in circles and nobody gets anywhere.
— Energy works that way, my dear Tim. But I only fill in the forms, you know. Well, now that you’ve made your gesture I hope it didn’t hurt. Let me see, where did I put your calculations?
He holds them an inch away from his watery eye and scrutinises them through five-dimensional glasses while Dr Dekko flinches in the tight meridians that surround him but do not fluctuate an inch into the wavering undulations that fill the rooms of others, doubling, trebling each other’s trebles like a map of ocean depths. Yet something emanates out of his small corona in the mad morse of neural cells that races round in no space, no privacy, his silence says, and receives at once the radiated objection well, you didn’t have to enter during my presence or let your scientific skin get peeled away. I know, however, how it happens, the worms in your head squirm as the world you see in even the gentlest creature sharpens its beak, so that the programme in your giant computer-mind gets blocked, goes blank of calculations, cries like a child of three. His mouth dips down a little and through his rimless glasses there pulses out on a low frequency an average story of a decoy blonde who costs a lot in scant clothing. He rides her with a sad passion in the basement of a life that keeps up the appearances with a smart modern villa garage balcony front-lawn back-garden air-conditioning a plump virtuous wife and three plump schoolgirl daughters. He stands plumply surrounded with feminity for whom he can do no wrong, so that he does it and his mouth dips down to twenty-five past five.
— Smile, Dekko, smile.
— That won’t help me. I only do all the work around here.
— Well, I’d better go, I’ve taken up enough of the Professor’s valuable time. He also has work to do, though you seem not to believe it.
— Of course I believe it. But he gets a decent salary, not to mention fat television fees. Why should he care?
— My dear good people, of course I care. I do my best. But the matter doesn’t rest in my hands.
— These hands that saved my life with –
— What?
He sits surrounded with the maps of radiation that waver through his watery eye and five-dimensional glasses. He nods and smiles through the infinite velocity of uncreated light. We do our best, he says. We tap the silent telephones of outer space, we bounce our questions on the galaxies which answer out of aeons. But they give no names, no explanations, only infinities of calculations. You on the other hand give names to the complex geometries of the soul, you explain perhaps, but do you heal, within space-time I mean. These maps represent something, certainly, but not the ultimate mystery of the first creation that has gone for ever with its scar inside one huge unstable atom. You can’t photograph such means of communication.
— How long do you think it will take?
Our elegant hearse rattles along the cobbled street, drawn by five elegant black horses. Something and I lie in the open coffin, making love quietly under the autumn sky filled with the Whale ahead, the River below, Cygnus half way down on the right with Deneb brighter than fifty million suns. The Serpent-Bearer has gone down below the horizon perhaps. Gut Bucket sits in front, holding the reins, while Dippermouth manipulates the brakes as we rattle downhill. But we have wedged the coffin firmly and it doesn’t slide. How long do you think it will take to the cemetery, Something?
— As long as you like.
— I long to die with you, to make it last. I love you, Something.
— You don’t have to say that.
— Tell me you love me, Something.
— I love you. More than you think. And more than you love me.
— We won’t try to win points on that.
The hearse stops with a jerk and no whirring of the brake on the wooden wheel. Gut swears by gut, lashing the horses on their rumps. Dippermouth says tut-tut, gee-up. The front horse raises his black tail, the others follow suit, so that in perfect concord they all shit long and generously onto the cobbled street and the stench surrounds us swiftly. Good horses, says the grave-digger, step down, my dears, you people have all the luck. Oh yes, you’ll die good, you’ll sprout, more than I will, I only do my job. Out you come. He spades up the horse-dung piles and fills the coffin with them.
— Where do you expect us to lie?
— On top. Underneath. On either side. Where you like. The snake eats its own tail. Have you got your route-maps? Oh well, who cares, the rich die in good earth, the poor inherit it in afterdays. In the meantime they clean up. Why haven’t you got any flowers? Flowers would absorb the smell.
— I don’t know. The midwife didn’t give us any. Why didn’t she give us any, Something?
— Well, you didn’t help by losing consciousness. A little consciousness can do a lot for a girl in a –
— I like that. She said breathe away, so I did. What do you expect?