4. If Subject discovers Earth
Please be sure you know the new procedure for this eventuality by next weekend. Lily considers the subject likely to force such a situation on us.
I wondered why they had bothered to keep up the pretense of the false name.
5. Hirondelle
Avoid all mention with the subject.
6. New Phase
Termination by end of July for all except nucleus.
7. State of subject
Maurice considers that the subject has now reached the malleable stage. Remember that for the subject any play is now better than no play. Change modes, intensify withdrawals.
The eighth sheet was a typewritten copy of the Frog verses Lily had recited to me.
Finally, on different paper, a scrawled message: Tell Bo not to forget the unmentionables and the books. Oh and tissues, please.
Each of these nine pieces of paper had writing on the back, obviously (or obviously intended to look like) Lily’s rough drafts.
This was evidently unfinished.
This was evidently a game between the sisters; alternate different handwritings.
The last three sheets had a fairy story on them.
Once upon a time there was a young prince, who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there were no princesses or islands in his father’s domains, and no sign of God, the young prince believed his father.
But then, one day, the prince ran away from his palace. He came to the next land. There, to his astonishment, from every coast he saw islands, and on these islands, strange and troubling creatures whom he dared not name. As he was searching for a boat, a man in full evening dress approached him along the shore.
“Are those real islands?” asked the young prince.
“Of course they are real islands,” said the man in evening dress.
“And those strange and troubling creatures?”
“They are all genuine and authentic princesses.”
“Then God also must exist!” cried the prince.
“I am God,” replied the man in full evening dress, with a bow.
The young prince returned home as quickly as he could.
“So you are back,” said his father, the king.
“I have seen islands, I have seen princesses, I have seen God,” said the prince reproachfully.
The king was unmoved.
“Neither real islands, nor neat princesses, nor a real God, exist.”
“I saw them!”
“Tell me how God was dressed.”
“God was in full evening dress.”
“Were the sleeves of his coat rolled back?”
The prince remembered that they had been. The king smiled.
“That is the uniform of a magician. You have been deceived.”
At this, the prince returned to the next land, and went to the same shore, where once again he came upon the man in full evening dress.
“My father the king has told me who you are,” said the young prince indignantly. “You deceived me last time, but not again. Now I know that those are not real islands and real princesses, because you are a magician.”
The man on the shore smiled.
“It is you who are deceived, my boy. In your father’s kingdom there are many islands and many princesses. But you are under your father’s spell, so you cannot see them.”
The prince returned pensively home. When he saw his father, he looked him in the eyes.
“Father, is it true that you are not a real king, but only a magician?”
The king smiled, and rolled back his sleeves.
“Yes, my son, I am only a magician.”
“Then the man on the shore was God.”
“The man on the shore was another magician.”
“I must know the real truth, the truth beyond magic.”
“There is no truth beyond magic,” said the king.
The prince was full of sadness.
He said, “I will kill myself.”
The king by magic caused death to appear. Death stood in the door and beckoned to the prince. The prince shuddered. He remembered the beautiful but unreal islands and the unreal but beautiful princesses.
“Very well,” he said. “I can bear it.”
“You see, my son,” said the king, “you too now begin to be a magician.”
The “orders” looked as if they had all been typed out at the same time, just as the poems were all scribbled in the same pencil with the same pressure, as if they had been written ad hoc in one sitting. Nor did I believe such “orders” could ever have been sent; what else was the telephone for? I puzzled over Hirondelle… still tender; must not be mentioned to me; some surprise, some episode I was never shown. The poems and the little epistemological fable were easier to understand; had clear applications. Obviously they could not have been sure that I would break into the Earth. Perhaps there were such clues littered all over the place, it being accepted on their side that I would find only a very small proportion of them. But what I did find would come to me in a different way from the blatantly planted clue—with more conviction; and yet might be as misleading as all the other clues I had been given.
I was wasting my time at Bourani; all I might appear to find there would confuse confusion.
That was the meaning of the fable. By searching so fanatically I was making a detective story out of the summer’s events, and to view life as a detective story, as something that could be deduced, hunted and arrested, was no more realistic (let alone poetic) than to view the detective story as the most important literary genre, instead of what it really was, one of the least.
On Moutsa, at that first sight of the party, I had felt, in spite of everything, a shock of excitement; and an equally revealing disappointment when I realized they were nothing: mere tourists. Perhaps that was my deepest resentment of all against Conchis. Not that he had done what he did, but that he had stopped doing it.