Under the Bridge
As she walked under
the Great Angled Bridge, Jill buttoned up her trench coat, then took her gloves
out of the right pocket and put them on. It was darn chilly for the third
season. Still, nothing could keep her home for a whole night. Not even sleep. On
a side street to the right she saw a flicker of light and heard a whispered chant,
partially covered by the clattering sound of a train crossing the bridge above:
“… fold the skies, flood the land, bend
the mount … melt the … don’t let go … till my love … to an end … the skies,
flood the land, bend the … melt the sand, don’t let go, of my hand…” Had to be Linda.
“Oy there, still
struggling with that spell? Did you try the new words from last week’s
Breakthrough?”
Wrapped in a tattered
green blanket, Linda was sitting on the pavement in front of a heart awkwardly drawn
with burning candles, clutching the amulet of the week – a deer antler with
five letters carved on the stem. Jill recognized the shape of the amulet in an
instant – it had been advertised all over the city for the past week.
“I tried, b-but can’t
remember them.”
“Push and turn, stab
and squirm, slice and burn, never learn.”
“N-no, that’s not it.”
“Just kidding, I don’t
remember them. My mind must have drifted off every single time I heard this
fantastic bit of advertising. At least you got the deer, eh? But hey, why don’t
you go home, you’ll freeze to death here.”
“M-maggie said the
hour is g-good.”
“You’ll get it next
moon, come on!”
“No, he’ll go away by
then.”
“Won’t do you much
good to have him if you’re dead frozen, though. Come on, spellcraft doesn’t
work, did it ever work for you?”
“N-no, but I just
started two moons ago.”
“Get up, you’re dead
drunk.”
Jill blew out the
candles, then helped the woman get up, struggling with the atrocious smell, and
walked her slowly to the base of the Great Pillar. There they pulled up a hatch
and descended into a vast maintenance hall, bordered by a line of closed gates
and lit by several huge light bulbs hanging low in the far corners of the
ceiling. Save for a thin web of conduits descending from above, the upper part
of the hall was empty. But the lower half was a labyrinth of pipelines, humming
generators, cables, control panels and other such, with the floor spotted by
hatches and small rails on which a few metallic wheeled carts jiggled and
jolted from one wall to the other.
“Careful with the
ladder, let me go first,” said Jill.
The two of them
descended carefully all the way down, Jill thinking that Linda must have taken
the bottle of whatever she’d had upstairs, to drink it on the street. No way
could you climb up to the top inebriated.
Once they landed
safely on the floor, they followed the sinuous trail of a tiny trolley until
they made it to the other side of the hall, where they opened another hatch and
jumped down into a narrow corridor heading toward a well lit room. They entered
a small makeshift apartment converted from a chain of control rooms. There were
two bedrooms, a small kitchen and a bathroom, and a large living room opening
out to another vast hall just like the one they had left behind.
“Look what we have
here, someone went to the trouble of bringing our Linda back home,” said one of
the two men in the room.
“Hi Lee, hi Edward,
you know she was drunk and making spells on the street, right?”
“Who can stop her?”
said the younger man, Lee.
“Well, you could,” grinned
Edward.
“Well, you both
should,” added Jill, “unless you want to have the urban police for breakfast. They
still haven’t found you here?”
“Oh come on, there’s
like a thousand hatches all over the hall, you know they don’t need every
control room they connect to.”
“Yeah but,
statistically speaking, you’re bound to have visitors in the future. At least
lock the hatch, that’ll give you some time to grab your pieces or jump through
the window.”
“We did, but then she
sneaked out and must have left the hatch unlocked…”
“I d-didn’t, I locked
it real tight,” mumbled Linda, stumbling to the couch and sinking in it face
down, next to Lee’s arm.
“Take this thing off,
it stinks like hell,” grumbled Lee, pulling the blanket off her and hurling it
in a corner of the room.
“It’s my ss-spell
blanket, gotta be green,” whispered Linda, falling into a deep slumber.
“There you go fellas,
enjoy whatever you were doing here.”
“Why are you not sleeping again?” asked Edward.
“I kinda tried, but
the night outside was so fresh and immaculate, I just felt like writing myself
on it.”
The two men looked at
her, one with annoyance and the other with amusement.
“You’re out of
sleeping pills, aren’t you,” said Edward.
“Yeah. Got any?”
Philosophy News
“The drawer on the
left, help yourself…”
“Oh, you’ve got the Philosophy News from last month” said
Jill, on the way to the cabinet.
“Someone literally
dropped it in my lap,” shrugged Edward. “Not buying this stuff, it’s just as
bad as politics.”
“As if you ever buy anything. Come on you know it’s not like
politics,” said Jill rummaging through the drawer and fishing out a bag of
pills. “It’s scientific hypotheses, how does that resemble politics?”
“Oh, everybody
arguing for some theory that’s politically correct for some agenda and
selecting their arguments accordingly, and anybody opposing it, regardless of
the reasons invoked, being called ‘philosophically ignorant’ and stuff.”
“You’re overreacting,
and we both remember why. Of course it happens sometimes, like it happens in
science, and news and everywhere. But we could just call it ‘a bad
philosophical day’ and move on to the next agenda-neutral hypothesis.”
“If you say so.
You’re the one dwelling on the world above, you should know better than us
sewage worms.”
Jill looked at
Edward’s face to see if he was serious. He was smiling, but the line of his lips
was a bit too tight.
“If you’re going to
start with that, I’ll just grab my pill and be gone. …And I’ll tell you nothing
about the ‘seeing is creating’ hypothesis from the latest PhilNews.”
Edward’s face turned
simultaneously into a frown and a huge smile.
“Was teasing you.”
“Half-teasing me.”
“Three quarters
teasing you?”
“Whatever.”
“So what’s with that
latest philosophical hit?”
“Someone said that
perhaps our scientific discoveries are not truly discoveries as such, but
rather prescriptions for the universe. That we’re creating it as we’re
discovering it. Which might explain various quantum-level oddities.”
Edward’s eyebrows
vanished behind the irregular bangs on his forehead.
“I need to see that.”
“To dig out political
implications and fuel your conspiracy-theories?”
“Oddly enough, no.
It’s an idea that looks vaguely familiar – but perhaps I just like it very much
and it fits my pre-existing ontological perspective too well. We have created
devices and contraptions, we have changed our environment in every way, why
should the trees and rocks have existed independently of us?”
“But the trees and
rocks and language and laws of mathematics, physics and chemistry are the same
everywhere. Whereas our devices are different, our flightpads are different, we
write the letters in different ways – if you just compare Angle City with
Naimes, who are on the same half of the world. We are the same too. Look Eddie, even if you blame a common origin
for the similar stuff, how do you explain the fact that we have two universals
– the constant and the variable?”
“Maybe we’ve been so
caught up in our classical paradigm that we see a duality of universals where
there is none, or an infinity, and we see it so strongly that we refuse to
understand its contradictions. Take language, for instance. There is word,
there is thought and there is object – and they should mirror each other
perfectly. But our syntax is one thing, physics is another, and psychology is
an entirely different matter.”
“So what do you
propose?”
“Something radically
new, my dear Jill. A new psychology, which reads our mental processes, as much
as we have managed to decipher so far, in an entirely different way. Or a new
language.”
“A new language! I
can’t even begin to imagine how that would work. Might as well suggest a new
universe, which nullifies the whole point of trying to decipher this one. Or
create it or whatever. There you go again, your anarchist intentions driving your philosophical hypotheses. Pot
calling kettle yellow with red dots.”
“…One way or another,
could you bring the issue with you some day?”
“Sure, I’m done with
it anyway. Look, you’re down to half a dozen sleeping pills, are you sure I can
take one?”
“We’re not using
those anymore.”
“Well then, I’ll be
on my way. Take care of Linda, ok?”
Lee waved a vague
goodbye, Linda was already out, and Edward flexed his arm in an odd salute.
Bogeyman Bogeyman
Jill left the
apartment and climbed out of the hatch in the maintenance hall. She was just
about to sneak past a trolley on her way to the big ladder, when she saw that
one of the large gates was slightly ajar. That was weird, she had never seen an
opened gate down here. She never knew what was behind them, so no room for
hesitation. She sneaked past some cable containers and generators until she
made it to the gate. No light came through. She rolled up the right sleeve of
her coat and turned on the flashlight strapped to her arm. On the other side of
the wall there was a railway. Subway? She couldn’t think of any line that
crossed the Great Angled Bridge in this area. But maybe it was just a
maintenance detour for faulty engines. Sure enough, a few seconds later a train
whizzed by, no lights turned on except for the front lights. A bit startled,
she waited for a minute, listened intently, then she squeezed through the
opening and lifted her arm a bit higher to explore the place. A few meters to
the left there was an indentation in the surface of the opposite wall, and
something white seemed to reflect her ray of light. She listened for one more heartbeat
to make sure that no train was coming and crossed the rails, moving slowly,
light fixed on the odd spot. She was less than a couple of steps away when she identified
it as a human shape – looking very much like a picture from a children’s book, a
fiend pretending to be a crumbling human statue. It rested against the wall in
a disgustingly human posture, legs crossed, leaning to the right, propped on
its elbow, fingers curled, almost faceless but with the faint trace of an
opened mouth still visible, thin cracks all over its head and torso. A Carving,
right there in front of her, said to inhale the breath, eat the tongue and drink
the eyes of the dead. Jill did not believe in fairy-tales, but she suddenly
felt a sizzling noise between her ears, and saw herself backing away, almost
mechanically, fumbling her way out through the gate, running to the hatch on
the floor, bruising herself against a generator and breaking a nail on the
handle of the trapdoor. She only stopped for breath when she found herself in
front of Edward’s stupefied eyes.
“A Carving. There’s a
bloody Carving in the tunnel behind the gates.”
Jill stared at Edward
with a mixture of shock and resentment.
“Yeah we saw him a
few weeks ago, Lee reacted pretty much like you did. A Carving Eddie, my lords a Carving‼ But back then Teddy had a
face, and he looked rather friendly. In fact Linda said he was handsome. I
assume he lost his looks?”
“He looks exactly like a faceless Carving. What is
it?”
“We have no idea what
he is, but then we don’t know what half the machinery in the maintenance hall
does.”
“But you know it is
made by humans and some people know how it operates.”
“Well, yeah. We
didn’t know what to do with the Carving, so we’ve named him Teddy and left him
there… We tried to call Maggie to help us with some idea, but when we told her what
it was she never set foot in this hall again.”
“I’m not sure that was such a bad idea.”
“Look, whatever
ontological doubts we might have, and however strong the stupid advertising on
spellcraft products, Teddy is certainly not going to drink anybody’s eyes. Not
that my sleep wasn’t a bit bumpy in the first nights after we’ve discovered
him, but there is such a thing as
‘terminally silly ideas’.”
Jill was staring blankly
in a corner of the room. “But you can’t just let it lie like that – have you at
least tried to – test things on him?” she asked, setting her eyes on Edward
with an uncomfortable grin.
“Of course we have,
but he’s fundamentally non-responsive. He’s not made of stone, his body seems
to have been made of human flesh at some point, except it kind of – stopped,
somehow.”
“That’s not
reassuring.”
“Well, I have never
touched any kind of supernatural creature to know what its body feels like, and
neither have you. So stop comparing real info with imagined data. Speaking of
real info, why don’t you come over there to investigate him? It will put your
mind at ease.”
Jill opened her eyes
wide.
“…Or not. OK, it is
too soon. We haven’t dared to enter the tunnel for a whole week after we’d
found him. But then, at some point, it was either that or moving our home to
another control room – and, generally, freaking out about the end of the world
as we know it. So one night Linda and I got really drunk and went over to see
Teddy. He seemed to have eroded a bit, but there was no Teddy-dust on the floor.
It’s like he sublimated, somehow. Now you say he’s faceless, so it’s like he’s
losing his features. Perhaps it is time to pay him another visit –”
“No thank you, I’m
good. I’ll leave him in your capable hands and panic myself out of here. Just send
me a message if you catch him do anything other than sublimate, all right?”
“Want me to see you
to the ladder?”
“Yes, please.”
Lawrence I
The next morning,
Jill could barely wake up. But then she had barely slept, so there wasn’t much
to wake up from. She took a mass-elevator down to Administration Hall B+, where
she had been working for the past 5 years or so. She was lucky to live in the urban
dwelling area straight above her working place, so, although the elevator ride
took about fifteen minutes at maximum speed, going to work didn’t really feel
much different from changing rooms inside your house. From her office window
she could see the Subway Station B+, and she suddenly realised that the
maintenance tunnel she had seen the night before was probably dead ahead.
Station B+ was straight under the high end of the bridge, about one kilometre away
from the Western Channel of Base River, itself about 200 meters wide. On the
other side of the channel you had the Base Field, as wide as the channel, covered
by all sorts of green and pretty and healthy stuff, with the Great Pillar right
in the middle of it, marking lower end of the tallest section of the Angled
Bridge above. Beneath the field was the Western Maintenance Cluster, expanding
downwards for about 20 kilometres. The maintenance hall straight under the
pillar must have been about 40 meters tall, and her office was about the same
depth below the ground.
So it was right there, in front of her. The
distance separating her from Teddy
felt like nothing at all, and at one point she almost expected him to crawl up
through her opened window.
“Hey, you here?”
A colleague suddenly
entered her office with a cable in hand.
“You have a message
from someone called Edward.”
Jill shivered and unfolded
the piece of paper. It said “Teddy is awake and happy. Come to meet us
tonight!”
In the evening, more
confused than afraid, Jill entered the makeshift apartment below the Great
Pillar, and saw a third man in a chair.
“Hey Lawrence, here’s
Jill. Be gentle with her, she saw your carving yesterday,” said Lee.
The man appeared to
be in his mid-twenties, had sandy hair, bright blue eyes, a long white coat and
a huge smile on his face. “Hi there, sorry you saw me in that appalling
constitution. I’ll try to find a better hiding spot next time I translate. I’m
Lawrence, not sure if you want to shake hands?”
Jill looked at him
with huge eyes, partially thinking that it was a prank. The shape of his head,
length of his fingers and general body proportions were right, but that didn’t
mean much.
“I understand that it
must be hard to believe, and I’ll prove it to you if I have to. But when I
translate I have no control over the carving I leave behind, nor am I able to
return in the proper moment in time or space. So if I leave, I might be back in
one month, and in Damville. It’s quite lucky this time I made it back in the
neighbourhood.”
“Very lucky indeed,”
said Edward, “to stroll back through the maintenance hall and meet us on our
way out.”
“Hey, I thought I had
found a good hiding spot. And I told you that the carving is a bookmark,” answered Lawrence, turning to Edward with an even
broader smile. “My self always makes an effort to continue where and when I
stop. More often than not, I manage to approximate well – returning just two
months after I left, instead of two centuries, is quite an accomplishment.
Compared to that, the distance between here and Purpose Flystreet 25B is
enormous.”
“So,” Linda started
to explain, in an admirably coherent speech, “Lawrence here says he is a
middweller. And that there are many parallel worlds all over the place, and he
jumps from one to another, always leaving a carving behind so he can come back later.”
“Not quite,”
interrupted Lawrence, “my self is forced to leave a carving behind because this
world knows me, and it knows me alive.”
“So what, your
existence is some kind of dramatic axiom of our world, that can’t be negated
without blowing us all up?” said Lee.
“Wait!” Jill was too
puzzled, on top of tired, to dig her way through this pile of absurd sentences.
“He’s been here since when? This morning?”
“Yes,” answered
Edward.
“And this chaos of
meaningless words is all you could come up with since then?”
“OK, we’ll leave you
with him, see if you manage to do any better. Please begin with the notion of
‘translation’. By all means, sit down, perhaps you’d like a cup of tea?”
scoffed Lee.
“Come, Jill,” said
Lawrence, “let’s start from the beginning.”
“This is too
frustrating, I’m going out, maybe one of you patient people will give me a
summary of whatever he’ll say.” Lee took his jacket and left. Linda squirmed
for a minute, then vanished after him with an awkward smile.
“Shoot,” grinned
Edward.
“Alright, first
question. Why were you all creepy and soul-devouring yesterday, and today you are
human?”
“No, that’s not the
beginning. It all begins with worlds and translation.”
“Which is you gliding
from one world to the next, through wormholes or stargates or stuff…”
“No Jill. I ‘glide’
through translations, although that’s an improper name for the process. I have
learned this name from one of the three other middwellers I have met in my life.
The word itself is incorporated in Adwellian, which is the name for this world.
And both ‘Adwellian’, and ‘middweller’ are incorporated in the sublanguage for
fantastic and mythical things.”
“Why do you insist on
names?”
“Because there are
critical rules to follow if I want to avoid spontaneous translation, Jill.”
“So what is this
translation? Does it have anything to do with explaining somebody’s words, or
some complicated jargon?”
“Not really, it is an
improperly named process. Finding a name more adequate for it is risky. It’s
the transition from speaking one language to speaking another one. But there is
no such thing as ‘meaning preservation’ involved in the process”
For one second, Jill
and Edward stared at each other.
“You’ll want to know
what I mean by ‘another language’, right?”
“I’m not so sure
anymore. We were talking about this yesterday, but it was just in hypothetical
terms. You’re talking about an actual physical thing. It’s making me dizzy.”
“But it’s the core of
the problem: can you imagine a different language?”
“I can always invent
a new word for some object. We’ve been calling you ‘Teddy’ until recently. And
then we could invent different names for everything, and talk in Weirdese so
nobody understands us. But other than being cool, what is the point of doing
so? And how does it give you superpowers?”
“That is not a new
language Jill, that is a new code. I am talking about –” and he stopped
suddenly, turned all white and became a fresh carving.
Jill blinked and took
a step backwards. The atavistic fear returned for a brief second, but when it
passed she started to examine him.
“A bookmark, that’s
what he called it,” said Edward. “As if he was reading the world, had to take a
break and leave the world on the table, and using a bookmark would help him
find the spot when he returns.”
“Wait, this white
thing is the leftovers of his translation? He is speaking a new language now? Did
that teleport him somewhere? He is just here around us and we don’t see him?”
Edward shrugged and let
out a deep sigh.
“What if we break
this thing?” Jill pushed the carving with her fist. It reacted almost like
human flesh, only a bit more plastic. “What if we cut it?”
“We probably won’t
ever see him again. Maybe it will kill him, too. But I am troubled about his
idea of a different language. I’m trying to break out of the concepts I know
and build up something totally new, but it’s not working.”
“I’m not even trying.
Remember yesterday when I was all brilliantly arguing about the absurdity of
such a hypothesis.”
“By the way, you
forgot the Philosophy News issue,
haven’t you?”
“Yes I have, but do
we still need it, after Teddy’s become Lawrence?”
“If he stays Teddy,
yes we need it.”
“We should call
Maggie, it’ll be fun.”
Lawrence II
One month passed by,
full of debates, Linda trying new commercial spells, Lee oblivious to
everything and practicing his marksmanship on the maintenance trolleys, Teddy folded
carefully in a corner of their living room. After a huge row about whether they
should move him at all, Lee simply grabbed him and placed him in a corner,
because ‘he was sick of the white decomposing freak in the middle of his
house’. They fetched Maggie too, Edward harbouring the faint hope that her screams
would bring Lawrence back. They didn’t.
He returned by
himself one day during the fourth season. Linda saw him gone one morning,
called on everybody, and they waited for him. In the evening, he stepped into
their living room, half-frozen and miserable – he had appeared in the middle of
the Eastern Channel. “Thank the lords you can swim,” said Lee.
“That’s nothing, one
day I translated to Brimian in front of a –”
“Shut up, man!” bawled
Edward.
“No, that’s all
right, I can talk about it. Last time
I translated because I tried to speak
it. It was very silly, and I should have known much better, I am about four
times as old as I look – although that is a very rude approximation…”
They bathed him,
clothed him, fed him, let him sleep. He insisted that they place a gramophone
next to his bed, with a long, continuous recording of someone talking. He said
it would prevent spontaneous translation in his sorry state.
Next day, Jill and
Edward congregated again for a Lawrence session.
“Look, you only see a
thing if you have a word for it – or the thing only exists for you if you have
a word for it. Take this compound of table, chair, floor, and the air between
them. Without my semantics, it’s actually a shapeless mess.”
“What?”
“Our language carves
the world around us in the shapes and colours we’re accustomed to see. Without
it, things are a mess. It’s probably easier to imagine this mess as ‘nothing’,
because you are so used to the basic lines and laws, that you can’t conceive
the very mess currently shaped as chair-table-floor being reinterpreted as,
say, somebody’s belly, or a mass of water, or an explosion, and these are only
things you can find in your own universe. The mess could be shaped like absolutely anything, does not have to
listen to the laws of your physics, does not have to follow your coordinate
system, does not have to follow your mathematics, does not have to follow your
notion of consciousness, nor your notion of self, nor your limits of the self.”
“So a language
transforms the universe?” asked Jill.
“It does not
transform it, it forms it. Without a
language, your universe is shapeless, it’s –”
“We got it, a mess,”
sighed Edward.
“Yes indeed.”
“So when you change
the language, you change the universe?”
“Yes!”
“But why can’t we do
it? We have imagined everything you told us, what more does it take to
translate?” asked Jill.
“I mean,” added
Edward, “how come that us thinking so does not make the table-chair-floor
compound change back into a mess?” asked Edward.
“It’s not a
seeing-is-creating thing, man!” protested Jill.
“The world does not
listen to my mind,” answered Lawrence. “The world is the uniform ontology
created by the semantics of the langue I’m in, in this case Adwellian, or simply
‘language’, as you call it. It is essentially a social compound. I may think
the wildest things, and even describe them, this won’t make them pop up in
front of me or get carved out of reality. That’s why I can talk about Brimian, or about the Original Mess all I want, what I see is still a chair, a
table and the floor, and if I employ various tools I can measure things about
the air between them.”
“So how do you
translate?”
“You don’t rename
pre-existing things. You don’t reimagine the world. You make new sense of the surrounding mess. It is impossible to re-code
one language into another, because there is no common meaning to be preserved.
I can’t make an Adwellian-Brimian dictionary, because the references of
Adwellian words are, literally, impossible to find in Brimian – even though the
two worlds are actually quite similar. I could teach you pseudo-Brimian all
day, by linking their words with things in your world plus a small label saying
‘parallel universe chair’, ‘parallel universe table’ and so on. But it would
still be only a code. For it to generate proper translation you would have to
learn entire slices of the world, by reinterpreting whole chunks of it at once.
You have to adhere to their reality.”
“But how can I do
that if imagination alone is not enough?”
“Imagination is the
key, but your current imagination is Adwellian. You have to imagine in
Brimian.”
“HOW?” Jill was
almost crying with frustration.
“Well, you probably
can’t. There are very few translators around these parts, told you I have met
only three in all my four lives so far. I can speak four languages – Adwellian,
Brimian, Cersith and Xim. I think I was born simultaneously in Brimian and Xim.
Then, while in Brimian, I met someone from Adwellian who taught me her world,
and I have somehow managed to learn Cersith by accident.”
“So you have not
existed in our world since your beginning.”
“No, and it took a
while to persuade Adwellian to take me seriously,” said Lawrence with a
chuckle. “So it’s very possible that I have only managed to learn the other two
because I was used to translation –”
Edward cut him
briefly: “Is it the same process every time?”
“Oh now I’m sure you
got it,” Lawrence beamed, “sorry for adding this. Back to the question – to me,
yes. But perhaps that is the reason why I can only access these four worlds,
and not the whole uncountable infinity of them. Perhaps my mechanism for
translation only makes a few worlds accessible…”
“One more thing –
what happens if one of your carvings gets destroyed while you are elsewhere? I
assume you always have three carvings waiting for you in three other languages,
right?”
“Yes I always have
three carvings, and I have to be mighty careful with them. Not only can they be
‘killed’, but they deteriorate too, in time, if I don’t visit often enough.
They are the acknowledgment of my existence in their respective worlds, and the
worlds can be very forgetful with the living. If someone kills my carving in
Adwellian while I am in Brimian, then my living
existence is not recognized anymore in your world – people know I existed,
there will always be a set of words associated with me, but I am no longer logged
in as ‘alive’. So if I go back to speaking Adwellian I assume automatically an
ontology where I am dead – thus depleted of both the possibility, and the
desire to go back to being alive in Brimian or elsewhere.”
“So when you die,
there is nothing terribly bad happening to you – it’s just that your semantic
system associates you with ‘dead’. You are being considered dead, you’re not dead-dead. Right?”
“Nothing is
something-something, you know. Or it is, but only relative to its own
semantics. The notion of ‘you’ is just the way your language carved you out of
the background mess.”
“So how do you know
that the Lawrence of Adwellian is the same as the Lawrence of Brimian?”
“I don’t. I mean, the
carving is clearly an anomaly, and the way I reappear in odd places at odd
moments in time breaks the laws of any world I’ve visited. But I can’t be sure
that it is weird because, in the meantime, I
truly travel in a parallel language. When I translate, I am being effectively
rewritten. Perhaps it is simply a set of coincidences creating an odd
continuity between the four Lawrences.”
“Or perhaps you don’t
translate at all, your sense of self is glitched and what you remember from the
other languages are things that never happened.”
“But then you’d still
have to explain the carving,” smiled Lawrence. “Speaking of which, could you
please take care of it while I take care of some business in Xim?”
“Yeah, sure, but –”
But he was already
gone.
Making Sense
A few hours later, Lee
and Linda returned home, looking all funny. Lee didn’t say a word, packed his
things and left. Linda sat expressionless on the couch.
“Tell me, what did
Lawrence say?” she asked.
Edward stared at her,
but Jill stopped him before he could ask anything. So he started to tell Linda
about Lawrence’s story, in detail. She understood it way faster than expected.
“You know guys,” said
Linda in the end, “this reminds me of another story I have read as a child. It
was a myth actually, a genesis story from a very old religion. Possibly as
false as the myth about Carvings. It said that in the beginning there was
nothing apart from the Makers. They got lonely though, so some of them started
to congregate, and thus, speaking to each other, they began to make sense of
the universe. But each congregation made its own sense independently from the
others, and without acknowledging the others when it did so, and they became
forever separated in other worlds. The changes they made in their worlds were
visible only to them, although they were cut from the same nothingness and
according to the same laws of sense-making. Now, the Makers started their
worlds unwittingly, while they began connecting with each other, creating world
and speak and society at the same time. And they kept making things, new
speakers too, until they created death and the possibility of an end to things.
So they made sense of their own disappearance. The created ones cannot know
what happens after you die in your world. But some of the original Makers got
caught between two congregations, and ended up learning both speaks and
participating in both sense-making processes. Now, these Makers could walk in
both worlds. They couldn’t speak in both ways at the same time, so when they
spoke in the way of one world they saw that world alone. These Makers were free
and could then take on as many bodies as they wanted, always roaming the
created worlds and enjoying their original sense. The end.”
Edward and Jill were
silent for a moment. “Well that’s interesting, said Jill eventually, but it’s
clearly a myth, and it is not what Lawrence told us about his own possible death.
And we don’t know that the semantic mechanism is the same for every world in
his story.”
“You’re ignoring the
whole pile of similarities with Lawrence’s tale,” shrugged Edward.
“He could have read
it somewhere.”
“And why change the final
part?”
“To make us have this
dialogue?”
“That’s a clinical
case of paranoia.”
“I think it means
that spellcraft should work,” said Linda all of a sudden.
Trying hard to hide
her exasperation, Jill answered “No Linda, you don’t validate all myths when
you find some shade of proof for one of them. Aside from the companies that
sell it, spellcraft is largely defined as fake in our world, and as such it is fake.”
“But you can create things,
words do have power, see?”
“According to your
myth, new sense is not created by words and ritual, but by need for closeness,
and by desire to communicate and share things. This is what shapes the large
mess we live in. Then the semantic universe sets off, and it casts your shape
in stone, and you finally begin to exist. Stop wasting your time with this,
Linda,” pleaded Edward.
Linda looked at the
tips of her fingers, she looked at her shoes, she leaned her forehead on her forearms,
then she got up, picked up her coat and left without a word.
“Does she have her
spellcraft kit with her?” asked Jill anxiously.
“No, it’s over there
near the sink. She is sober, too. I guess she just left to clear her head,
sometimes she does that… And so will I. Can I walk you home over the Bridge?
The big elevator is still working. It’s been a while since we took a walk
together.”
Jill smiled
wistfully. “Sure. The bad old times.”
On her way out, she
stopped in front of Lawrence’s ghost, still seated in his chair. After looking
at him for a moment she leaned over and whispered in his delicately carved ear.
“That was a lovely hypothesis. Godspeed and come back to us before we reach maximum
semantic entropy.”