Essential Science Fiction Novels - Volume 4. Griffith George Chetwynd
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what if he had been a living one? Like the ancient ones, heh?” We’d have b... b..., a fountain running from the fat bubbling lips. The sun was shining through the ceiling, the sun above, the sun from the sides, its reflection from below. O- on R-13’s lap and minute drops of sunlight in O-’s blue eyes. Somehow my heart warmed up. The square-root of minus one became silent and motionless....
“Well, how is your Integral? Will you soon hop off to enlighten the inhabitants of the planets? You’d better hurry up, my boy, or we poets will have produced such a devilish lot that even your Integral will be unable to lift the cargo. ‘Every day from eight to eleven’ ...” R- wagged his head and scratched the back of it. The back of his head is square; it looks like a little valise (I recalled for some reason an ancient painting “In the Cab”). I felt more lively.
“You too are writing for the Integral? Tell me about it. What are you writing about? What did you write today, for instance?”
“Today I did not write; today I was busy with something else.” “B-b-busy” sprinkled straight into my face.
“What else?”
R- frowned. “What? What? Well, if you insist I’ll tell you. I was busy with the Death Sentence. I was putting the Death Sentence into verse. An idiot—and to be frank, one of our poets.... For two years we all lived side by side with him and nothing seemed wrong. Suddenly he went crazy. ‘I,’ said he, ‘am a genius! And I am above the law.’ All that sort of nonsense.... But it is not a thing to talk about.”
The fat lips hung down. The varnish disappeared from the eyes. He jumped up, turned around and stared through the wall. I looked at his tightly closed little “valise” and thought, “What is he handling in his little valise now?”
A moment of awkward asymmetric silence. I could not see clearly what was the matter but I was certain there was something....
“Fortunately the antediluvian time of those Shakespeares and Dostoyevskis (or what were their names?) is past,” I said in a voice deliberately loud.
R- turned his face to me. Words sprinkled and bubbled out of him as before, but I thought I noticed there was no more joyful varnish to his eyes.
“Yes, dear mathematician, fortunately, fortunately. We are the happy arithmetical mean. As you would put it, the integration from zero to infinity, from imbeciles to Shakespeare. Do I put it right?”
I do not know why (it seemed to me absolutely uncalled for) I recalled suddenly the other one, her tone. A thin invisible thread stretched between her and R- (what thread?). The square-root of minus one began to bother me again. I glanced at my badge; sixteen-twenty-five o’clock! They had only thirty-five minutes for the use of the pink check.
“Well, I must go.” I kissed O-, shook hands with R- and went to the elevator.
As I crossed the avenue I turned around. Here and there in the huge mass of glass penetrated by sunshine there were grayish-blue squares, the opaque squares of lowered curtains,—the squares of rhythmic, Taylorized happiness. On the seventh floor I found R-13’s square. The curtains were already lowered.
Dear O-.... Dear R-.... He also has (I do not know why I write this “also,” but I write as it comes from my pen), he too has something which is not entirely clear in him. Yet I, he and O-, we are a triangle; I confess, not an isosceles triangle but a triangle nevertheless. We, to speak in the language of our ancestors (perhaps to you, my planetary readers, this is the more comprehensible language) we are a family. And one feels so good at times, when one is able for a short while, at least, to close oneself within a firm triangle, to close oneself away from anything that....
Record Nine
Liturgy
Iambus
The Cast-Iron Hand
A solemn bright day. On such days one forgets one’s weaknesses, inexactitudes, illnesses, and everything is crystalline and imperturbable like our new glass....
The Plaza of the Cube. Sixty-six imposing concentric circles—stands. Sixty-six rows of quiet serene faces. Eyes reflecting the shining of the sky,—or perhaps it is the shining of the United State. Red like blood, are the flowers—the lips of the women. Like soft garlands the faces of the children in the first rows, nearest the place of action. Profound, austere, gothic silence.
To judge by the descriptions which reach us from the ancients, they felt somewhat like this during their “Church services,” but they served their nonsensical unknown god; we serve our rational god, whom we most thoroughly know. Their god gave them nothing but eternal, torturing seeking; our god gives us absolute truth, that is, he has rid us of any kind of doubt. Their god did not invent anything cleverer than sacrificing oneself, nobody knows what for; we bring to our god, The United State, a quiet, rational, carefully thought-out sacrifice.
Yes, it was a solemn liturgy for the United State, a reminiscence of the great days, years, of the Two Hundred Years’ War,—a magnificent celebration of the victory of all over one, of the sum over the individual!
That one stood on the steps of the Cube which was filled with sunlight. A white, no not even white, but already colorless glass face, lips of glass. And only the eyes—thirsty, swallowing, black holes leading into that dreadful world from which he was only a few minutes away. The golden badge with the number already had been taken off. His hands were tied with a red ribbon. (A symbol of ancient custom. The explanation of it is that in the old times when this sort of thing was not done in the name of the United State, the convicted naturally considered that they had the right to resist, hence their hands were usually bound with chains.)
On the top of the Cube, next to the Machine, the motionless, metallic figure of him whom we call the Well-Doer. One could not see his face from below. All one could see was that it was bounded by austere, magnificent, square lines. And his hands.... Did you ever notice how sometimes in a photograph the hands, if they were too near the camera, come out enormous? They then compel your attention, overshadow everything else. Those hands of his, heavy hands, quiet for the time being, were stony hands,—it seemed the knees on which they rested must have had pains to bear their weight.
Suddenly one of those hands rose slowly. A slow cast-iron gesture; obeying the will of the lifted hand, a Number came out on the platform. It was one of the State poets, whose fortunate lot it was to crown our celebration with his verses.
Divine iambic brass verses thundered over the many stands. They dealt with the man, who, his reason lost and lips like glass, stood on the steps and waited for the logical consequences of his own insane deeds.
... A blaze.... Buildings were swaying in those iambic lines, and sprinkling upward their liquified golden substance, they broke and fell. The green trees were scorched, their sap slowly ran out and they remained standing like black crosses, like skeletons. Then appeared Prometheus (that meant us).
“... he harnessed fireWith machines and steelAnd fettered chaos with Law....”
The world was renovated; it became like steel,—a sun of steel, trees of steel, men of steel. Suddenly an insane man, “Unchained the fire and set it free,” and again the world had perished.... Unfortunately I have a bad memory for poetry, but one thing I am sure of: one could not choose more instructive or more beautiful parables.
Another slow, heavy gesture of the cast-iron hand and another poet appeared on the steps of the Cube. I stood up! Impossible! But ... thick negro lips,—it was he. Why did he not tell me that he was to be invested with such high.... His lips trembled; they were gray. Oh, I certainly understood; to be face to face with the Well-Doer, face to face with the hosts of Guardians! Yet one should not allow oneself to be so upset.
Swift sharp verses like an axe.... They told about an unheard-of crime, about sacrilegious poems in which the Well-Doer was called.... But no, I do not dare to repeat....
R-13 was pale when he finished, and looking at no one (I did not expect such