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.
Some commentators have expended great energy and ingenuity to show that all the work of these, and several other artists and (particularly) biologists, associated over the years with the Circle, revolved around the parameters of Slade’s philosophy—so that Slade might be considered the Circle’s center. If none has completely succeeded, one hindrance to their proof is the complexity of Slade’s work. Also, Slade’s thought for this time is only available through her students’ report. The only thing Slade herself published in these years was her translation, from the twentieth-century American “... into this Magyar-Cantonese dialect, with its foggy distinctions between the genitive and the associative, personally or politically enforced, which serves us for language in the Satellites, on Mars, as well as over eighty percent of Earth ...” (translator’s introduction) of Susanne K. Langer’s Mind. Her students through this period were allowed to make notes and were encouraged to “... construct alternate models from these ideas as widely deviant as possible.’* But her talks could not be recorded, as Slade considered her BPR-57-c sessions then “... merely sketches, full of inaccuracies ...” which makes assessment of her actual ideas rather difficult—until the corpus of notes, rescued from that small, back, basement room two weeks after the war, is made available.
Other commentators, less successfully, have tried to show that all the work of the principle Circle members, including Slade’s, hinges on the mystic precepts of the Sygn. As anyone knows who has read in the Circle’s history, that history is intimately connected with the Sygn’s: Barbara and Otuola were both members of the sect during their adolescence, only to break with it (in Barbara’s case peacefully, in Otuola’s rather violently) in their twenties. Barbara’s first book, Relearning the Language, deals fairly directly with his religious struggles during his speechless youth. And the Sect of Silent Singers, who figure so prominently in the action of EridanVs fifth, seventh, and seventeenth acts, is a fairly direct, if unflattering, portrayal. Slade’s final residence at the Sygn co-operative is only another example, among the myriads possible to cite. The difficulty of proof here, however, is the difficulty in learning more than superficial fragments of the Sygn dogma. Those who emerged from the sect, even those highly critical such as Otuola, were fairly respectful of its mysteries: the sect renounces speech, writing, all publicity, and sex. This makes ascertaining its fundamental tenets during these years only slightly more difficult than ascertaining the letter of Slade’s philosophy.
The most probable verdict is, probably, the most conservative: a great deal of personal, social, and spiritual interplay occurred between members of the Circle and members (and exmembers) of the Sygn. But it is what these men and women brought to it, rather than what they took from it, that ultimately makes the Circle the fascinating moment in the intellectual life of the Satellite Federation that it is.
Slade was fifty-four. Summa Metalogiae was two dozen years in the past. The triumphant opening of Eridard (which to many represents the peak of Circle creativity) was two years by. Only three months before, Corinda’s eighth collection of poems, Printed Circuits, had occasioned her receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature, making her not only the youngest person so awarded (she was then thirty-six), but also the first person born on a moon to be so honored by Earth’s Swedish Academy. (Many felt, with justification, that the award was really being given, in retrospect, for her magnificent Eridani libretto, written four years before. Even so, many took the award as a beacon whose light might hopefully banish some of the shadows which, day by day, were darkening relations between Earth and the Satellite Federation.) In the thirteenth paramonth of the second yearg, Ashima Slade, Gene Trimbell (then twenty-four), Ron Barbara (twenty-nine), with two men who had recently broken with the Sygn, Sven Holdanks (nineteen) and Pedar Haaviko (fifty-eight), decided to form a family commune. Otuola was, apparently, invited to join. For various reasons, however, she refused.