Slade’s monthly seminar (which he held in person) had only six attendees. The traditional presentation procedure of the Harbin-Y Lectures is a personal delivery from the stage of the K-Harbin Auditorium to an invited audience of several thousand.
Twenty years ago, Slade had recorded a superb programmed course called The Elements of Reason: An Introduction to Metalogics which is still on store, unre-vised, in the Satellite General Information Computer Network (and is considered the best introduction to Slade’s own, early, ovular work, the two-volume Summa Metalogiae). At ease before any sort of recording or mechanical device, Slade still felt he would be uncomfortable before such a large, live audience.
The academic confusion over Slade’s not overly exceptional request escalated, however, out of all proportion. Slade was an eccentric figure in the University, whose personal rarity on campus had lead to some extraordinary (and extraordinarily idiotic) myths. Many of his colleagues were, frankly, afraid he would simply conduct a BPR-57-c session, completely inaccessible to his audience. No one was sure how to ascertain tactfully if he would discuss his work at the level they felt was called for by the occasion. How all this was finally resolved is not our concern here. But once more Slade did not deliver that year’s Harbin-Y Lectures.
Slade was not invited to give the next year’s lectures; it is said he expressed great relief about this to some of his colleagues with whom he was in correspondence, as well as to his seminar students. The reports, however, of Slade’s work in the Modular Calculus (growing out of his early work in metalogics) had percolated down from the devotees of BPR-57-c, making it inevitable that he be asked again; once more the invitation was extended. Slade consented. This time he discussed the outline of the three lectures he wished to present with the Harbin-Y trustees in a way that lead them to believe the talks would at least approach the comprehensible. A holographic simulation was arranged in the auditorium. The lecture titles were announced:
Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus:
1) Shadows
2) Objectives
3) Illuminations
The three lectures were scheduled for the usual evening times. The usual invitations were sent. Thanks to five years confusion, there was a good deal more than the usual curiosity. Many people—far more than might be expected for such an abstruse affair—turned to Slade’s early work, the serious in preparation, the curious for hints of what was to come.
A perusal of any dozen pages from the Summa reveals Slade’s formal philosophical presentation falls into three, widely differing modes. There are the closely reasoned and crystallinely lucid arguments. There are the mathematical sections in which symbols predominate over words; and what words there are, are fairly restricted to: “... therefore we can see that ...”
“... we can take this to stand for ...”
“... from following these injunctions it is evident that ...” and the like. The third mode comprises those sections of richly condensed (if not inpenetrable) metaphor, in language more reminiscent of the religious mystic than the philosopher of logic. For even the informed student, it is debatable which of these last modes, mathematical or metaphorical, is the more daunting.
One of the precepts of Slade’s philosophy, for example, explicit in his early work and implicit in his later, is a belief in the absolute distinction between the expression of “process/relation/operation” on the one hand and the expression of “matter/material/substance” on the other for rational clarity, as established by the contemporary episteme; as well as a belief in their absolute and indeseverable interface, in the real Universe. About this, Slade has remarked: “... This interface will remain indeseverable as long as time is irreversible. Indeed, we can only model the elements on either side separably with those tools—memory, thought, language, art—by which we can also construct models of reversible time.”[3] As one of Slade’s commentators has remarked, in an issue of the Journal of Speculative Studies: “Put this way, it is either understood or it isn’t. Explication here is, really, beside the point.”
The confusion attendant on Slade’s previous invitations to lecture was a vivid memory for many of that year’s audience. The people who assembled in the K-Harbin Auditorium that evening came with curiosity, trepidation, and—many of them—excitement.
The auditorium doors were closed.
At the expected time, Slade (with his desk and his blackboard) materialized on stage—dark, small-boned, broad-hipped—in a slightly quavery holographic simulation. The audience quieted. Slade began—there was some difficulty with the sound. After a few adjustments by the student engineer, Slade good-naturedly repeated those opening sentences lost on a loose connection.
An hour and twenty minutes into Slade’s presentation, the first gravity cut hit Lux’s unlicensed sector. Two minutes after that, there was total gravity loss. The city was stripped of atmosphere. And (among five million others) Ashima Slade, still in holographic simulation on the K-Harbin Auditorium stage, was dead.
Ashima Slade was born in Mars’s Bellona in 2051. Little is known of his childhood; part was apparently passed in Phoenix Keep, a suburb just outside the city, and part in the notorious Goebels (which some have compared to the unlicensed sectors of the major satellite cities; the comparison must suffice for those who have never been to Bellona, but it has been argued elsewhere, lengthily, and on both sides). At seventeen Slade emigrated to the satellites, arriving, in a shipload of twenty-five hundred, at Callisto Port. Two months after his arrival, he became a woman, moved again to Lux and for six months worked in one of the city’s light-metal refineries: it was here she first met Blondel Audion, when the famous poet descended, among some dozen others, for a flyting, or ritual exchange of poetic insults, in the refinery cafeteria. At six months’ end
(four days after the flyting’s) Slade entered Lux University. Two and a half years later, she published the first volume of her Summa Metalogiae, which brought her, academically, both prestige and notoriety; and which led, over the next few years (when the second volume of the Summa appeared), to the development of metalogical program analysis, giving Slade a permanent, top-slot credit rating. Slade’s reaction to the commercial success of what had begun as purely abstract consideration was sometimes humorous and, sometimes, bitter. Undoubtedly this practical success prejudiced many of her colleagues in those early years—and in several directions. Some took it as a vindication of pure scholarship. Others took it as an unfortunate sullying of the same. Still others saw it as evidence that Slade’s own work was, at most, clever, rather than fundamentally profound. Slade herself once said (in a seminar, after a morning spent reviewing some of the commercial work done in metalogical analysis that had been sent her to review): “The saddest thing to me is that, though we are working under the same principles and parameters, I find what they are doing with them trivial, while they would find what I am doing with them incomprehensible, or meaningless if they could comprehend it.”
At about the time of the publication of the second volume of the Summa, Slade first became closely associated with the Circle (as it has come to be commonly known since the various studies in the first decade of this century), a collection of extremely talented artists and scientists, some of whom were also connected with the University, some of whom not, but all of whom lived and worked (sometimes together, sometimes in opposition) in Lux. Over twenty-odd years, it included George Otuola, whose twenty-nine-hour opera cycle Eridani is still, twelve years after its initial production, considered one of the greatest influences on contemporary art; it included the mathemeticians Lift Zolenus and Saleema Slade (no relation), the poets Ron Barbara, Corinda, Blondel Audion, and Foyedor Huang-Ding, as well as the venerable actress Alona Liang and her then-protege: Gene Trimbell, better known in the world of the theater today as the Spike, who at age twenty-two, directed that first, legendary production of Eridani.
3
All quotes attributed to Slade are from the notes of Slade’s current and former students. Statements reported in indirect discourse are from personal reminiscences of both students and Slade’s fellow tutors and—in one instance—from notes on a comment the precise wording of which the writer did not feel she could vouch for, as the notes had been hastily jotted down seventeen years ago. To all who have helped in the preparation of this appendix, the editor extends her grateful thanks.