White Light (Axoplasm Books) Page 9

  Ahead of us lay another meadow, more tangled than before. It ended in another cliff, smoother and ten feet higher than the last. The Guide and his party had angled across the meadow away from us. It was probably easier over there. I wondered if the Guide had knocked me off balance on purpose. More than likely. For my own safety, of course.

  I didn’t see how we were ever going to make any progress. Franx could hardly walk in the meadows, and I could hardly climb the cliffs. No way we could shift into an infinite speed-up at this rate.

  Franx interrupted my fretting. “By way of amplification, let me add that I cannot fly unless I have been in some way propelled into the air. At festivals one hops, but this is not feasible in the too entangling meadows.”

  “Why don’t you just fly from cliff to cliff?” I suggested.

  “Do you think I’d have waited for you if I could? Boon companion though you are, my soul hungers after the Absolute, the One, the journey’s end. My heart leaps far, but my body lags. In fine, I cannot fly so far.” He looked at me expectantly.

  It had been so easy to be carried up the cliff. Maybe I should carry him across the meadow. He was big, but not dense. “Get on my back,” I suggested. “I’ll hop whenever we touch ground, and you can fly us between jumps.”

  “I thought you’d never ask.” His clinging little feet moved up my sides and his mandibles rested lightly on my neck. I gave a little shiver. What if he snapped my head off and drank me like a bottle of cherry cola?

  But it worked great. I squatted and jumped into the air. Then Franx’s wings buzzed and we sailed twenty or thirty feet. When we hit my legs were bent and ready, and we bounded off again. We crossed the meadow in five jumps.

  On the cliff we used a sort of reverse rappel. Franx flew as high as he could, and then I grabbed hold of a ledge and shoved us higher. His wings would gain another ten or fifteen feet and I’d kick or pull against the cliff to speed us up again.

  We covered dozens of meadows and cliffs that way, falling into a hypnotic rhythm. As on the approach to the hotel, the landscape began to seem alive and cooperative. We went into an infinite speed-up.

  Boundless energy flowed through us out of Mount On, and we zapped past our first alef-null cliffs. After every cliff was always a steep little meadow of about the same width…say a hundred feet. But every cliff was ten feet higher than the one before. We stopped to look back after those first alef-null cliffs.

  It was a strange sight. There was no last stripe of rocks in the infinite pattern marching up towards us like a flattened staircase. Whenever I would try to work my way back down, my attention would suddenly dart down to some one cliff…say the billionth from the bottom. I could work my way back up, a cliff at a time, but I could only move my attention back down in jerks.

  “What do you see?” I asked Franx.

  His answer was complex. Rather than looking at individual cliffs he preferred to focus on the overall pattern. He made much of the fact that each meadow was the same width, but that each cliff was ten feet higher than the one before. He pointed out that this ensured that the overall shape of the meadow- cliff pattern was parabolic, and gave a short proof of this fact. He speculated that the rate of growth of the next series of cliffs would be given by a quadratic function, leading to a meadow- cliff curve of the third degree…

  I interrupted him. “Where did you learn all that? I thought you weren’t a mathematician.”

  “That was poetry. Rather finely chiselled, if I do say so myself.”

  “Where I come from,” I began. “On Earth…”

  “I know what you call poetry. Sense impressions, emotions…the well-turned phrase, the fly in amber. But on Praha the equations are poetry too.”

  “But mathematics is supposed to be boring,” I protested. “Long proofs, formal details. Of course the idea isn’t boring, but the details…”

  “We never do the details,” Franx replied. “Because we don’t care if our equations are correct. It’s how they feel that counts.”

  We started up again. This time we did a sort of super speed-up, and started flicking past cycles of alef-null cliffs at what felt like one go. In each cycle of cliffs a more rapid rate of growth was embodied. Once they began to grow exponentially it seemed like I was always kicking or clawing at bare rock with Franx’s wings buzzing steadily behind me. Everything glowed with light and the rocks gave off a dry dusty smell. We kept at it for a long time, folding level after level of speed-ups into each other, passing infinity within infinity of cliffs.

  At some point I realized that we had stopped moving again. We were in a little handkerchief of a meadow with bare rock all around. Franx was lying on his back and fiddling with his legs.

  “Is this alef-one?” I asked hopefully.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think it’s what you’d get by raising alef-null to the alef-null power alef-null times in a row.”

  “You mean epsilon-zero?”

  Franx gave an affirmative leg-twitch. “That’s what they called it.”

  “Who?”

  “I’ve spent a lot of time at that Hotel, my dear Felix. Although the Guides are reticent, the failed climbers are not. The raison d’être for most climbs is the triumphant reappearance on the terrace where the new arrivals and old companions are regaled with marvelous tales of derring-do.”

  “And you’ve heard of people getting to alef-one without a Guide?”

  “Indeed I have. It’s not so easy as all this has been. It requires a new order of being, a new plane of existence.”

  “I don’t see how we can top that last effort. And even if we fold speed-up after speed-up together, we’re still just going to get some limit of countably many stages. Alef-one can’t be reached by any countable process. We’re never going to get out of the second number class.

  Franx just lay there in the dry grass. There were hardly any flowers up here. I picked a blade and held it up to the sky. This leaf had ten-fold branching. I imagined labelling the branches from left to right with the ten digits zero through nine.

  I noticed a tiny bug crawling up the leaf. At the first branching he hesitated, then took number 3 and continued upward. At the next branching he chose number 6, and at the fork after that he went for number 1. Then he fell into my eye.

  I lidded him out, thinking about what would happen if he continued forever. His final path could be coded up by a single real number gotten by sticking his choices together: .361… I realized there were just as many ways to crawl up that leaf as there were real numbers between zero and one. A whole continuum of possible paths…c of them.

  Just then the leaf vaporized into a puff of smoke and a loud crack split the air.

  It was the Guide again. He was hovering a few hundred feet away from us, carrying a humanoid climber at the end of each of his three legs. His body was squat and cylindrical. On top was a glittering dome and three snaky hoses.

  One of those hoses was pointed straight up and seemed to be sucking in air rapidly enough to hold the Guide and his party aloft. The other hose was poised to shoot another energy bolt at us, and the third was talking.

  “I regret that because of the small number of Guide-party openings and the unusually large number of well-qualified applicants it is now clear that we will be unable to assist you on Mount On. As you will certainly understand, public safety dictates that no unaccompanied climbers are allowed. Please return at once.”

  It made me sick just to look back at the cliffs we’d climbed. It looked like the next foothold was infinitely far away. Of course we could try hang-gliding it…

  “Into the fog,” Franx shrilled, scuttling away. The Guide’s first energy blast had set a part of the meadow afire, and the infinite-leaved little plants were giving off a dense, almost liquid smoke. I didn’t feel like jumping alone, so I took off after Franx.

  Another bolt crashed into the ground at my left, and then I ran into the flames and thick smoke with my breath held. I could hear Franx twittering somewhere ne
arby, but the visibility was zero. White smoke tendrils twined, wrapped and rewrapped, smeared together in a continuum. I was seeing spots, my ears rang, I had to breathe. I gasped in a lungful of the solid smoke.

  I could feel it moving down into my lungs, branching through my bronchial tubes and alveoli…a continuous smear of off-white spreading out to a continuum of bright points in my chest. Fantastic infinite visions crowded in on me and I fell together.

  No. 12

  The Library of Forms

  When I came to, I was slumped over a typewriter. I had been writing, writing for a long time and slipping the completed sheets into a slit in the desk.

  The desk was light gray plastic. It joined seamlessly to the walls of the tiny cubicle I found myself in. Everything in the room was white or gray. I stood up and tried the door behind me. Locked. There was a sound of machinery at work inside the desk, but the drawer was locked too.

  I sat down and looked at the typewriter. It was a standard IBM Selectric, except that the typing ball was surrounded by a great deal more machinery than usual. With a practiced gesture I rolled in a sheet of paper and began typing.

  A dizzy sense of déja vu, of multiple personalities, hit me as I began to type. I had already written everything on this machine, every variation of my story…

  My fingers continued to dance across the keys. I was writing a description of my life, a rambling description that strolled down every leafy avenue of thought, wandered across unmarked connecting paths, and crashed through thickets of detail.

  Ordinarily a writer has to leave things out. If he mentions his pen he doesn’t tell you who sold it to him, what the salesgirl ate for lunch, where her tuna came from, how the ocean was formed.

  To include every detail, every associated fact, leads to including the whole universe. It all sticks together like an old dish of hard candy. And to describe the whole universe, an infinity of words are needed. But alef-null was no longer a barrier for me. I could make Proust’s dream come true.

  I slid into a speed-up. The thoughts flowed through my fingers and onto the page. Every detail was there, every fleeting association was explained, and the whole infinity that was my life so far was there on the page.

  It shot up out of the typewriter. I plucked it out of the air and scanned it with satisfaction. I had it all down in alef-null lines. There was a shrinking field in the typing ball, so that each line was 49/50 as high as the one above it. There was always room for fifty more lines.

  As I had used a speed-up to read through the page I again had that feeling of multiple identity. I had already written this page before…not once but many times, a little different each time. Just then the desk thocked the way a pinball machine does when you’ve won a free game.

  The drawer-front swung down and a large book, freshly bound in leather, came sliding out. It dropped onto the waxy linoleum floor with a thud. I picked it up and let it fall open in my lap.

  The right-hand page was an infinitely detailed description of someone’s life. In many ways it resembled my own. Except this guy had dropped out of college, gotten laid a lot and died in a motorcycle accident.

  On the left there was no top page. The pages there seemed a little transparent, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t seem to peel off a single last one. It was like trying to find the biggest real decimal number less than 1, 0.9, 0.99, 0.999?

  The back of the first page I’d looked at was blank, and when I looked for the next page I ran into the same problem. There were plenty more pages, but I couldn’t seem to pick up just one of them. What’s the first real number after 1?

  Whenever I let the book fall open I would find a single page in the middle, isolated between two topless heaps of pages. The pages were packed in just like points on a line segment. There were c of them.

  I did not see how I could have written it all, but each page I looked at seemed familiar. The visions after I’d inhaled that smoke were all here. I had seen every possible variation of my life, and I had proceeded to describe each one of them in endless detail. I had described a whole continuum of parallel worlds…somehow I had pulled the Many into One.

  Occasionally I found two pages that differed from one another only in a single name, but usually the differences were much greater. In some lives the narrator could fly, in some he was paralyzed; in some he was a genius, in others he was insane. Somehow they were all me.

  For awhile I searched for a correct description of my future, but it was pointless. Any mad variation, any possibility, could be found on some page…occasionally even beginning, “This is the true story of Felix Rayman.”

  Carrying the book in my hand I went over and tried the door to my cubicle again. This time it opened. I stepped out into the stacks of a library. Each bookcase was filled with books like the one I had written, each with a gold-lettered title on the spine.

  I turned my book to see its title. The Lives of Felix Rayman. You never would have guessed my name from reading the book. Each possible life was in there with each of the names I might have had. I had a dizzying feeling that in a parallel world not too far off I had just written the same book… except that there the title was something like The Lives of Vernor Maxwell or The Lives of Cobb Anderson.

  On impulse I squeezed my book into the shelf in front of me and looked at some of the other volumes. One called Dogs caught my eye, and I took it down. On each page there was a story about a dog. They were all alef-null words long, and sometimes made cumbersome reading. One of them really got to me though. It was sort of like Call of the Wild, and it was all I could do to keep from howling when I finished.

  I took down another book, called Faces. On each page was a delicately shaded full-color portrait of a possible face…each one drawn with infinite precision. I flipped through it for awhile, hoping to see someone I knew, and eventually found a face that was almost exactly that of April’s. I looked at it for a long time.

  Suddenly I heard voices a few aisles away. Still barefoot, I padded quietly towards the noise to find two young women in conversation. The one talking wore her light-colored hair in a lank pony-tail. She had blank skin and thin features.

  “I’m glad you drew all the lines,” she was saying, “but you needn’t have put in those dots.”

  The other woman was shorter and had curly dark hair. Her lips were thick and there was a gap between her front teeth. The short sleeves of her blouse cut into the flesh of her arms. “This is a richer book…” she was beginning when I appeared.

  They were not too surprised to see me. “Did you write your book?” the thin-lipped one asked. I nodded and she held out her hand. “May I see it?”

  “I left it back there,” I said, “on the shelf by the door. It’s called The Lives of Felix Rayman.”

  “I’ll have to check it over before you can leave.”

  “Go ahead,” I said, and she walked off, her heels sounding on the stone floor.

  “She wants me to do mine over,” the curly-haired girl said to me, handing me the book she was holding.

  “Smooth Curves,” I read from the spine, and opened the book. The first page I saw had a sort of figure eight on it. I looked at more pages. An oval, an arc, a rounded double-you, a squiggle, a scribble. On some of the pages there were a few isolated dots as well. “She doesn’t like the dots?”

  “No,” the girl answered with a grimace. “I don’t know why I put them in. I went white and flew here from Truckee just to do the smooth curves…there’s c of them, you know, by Taylor’s Theorem…”

  I interrupted. “Don’t tell me you’re a mathematician?”

  She nodded. Just then I heard the librarian calling to me. “Mr. Rayman, could you come here? There’s a problem…”

  “There always is,” the chubby mathematician whispered to me.

  “How can we get out of here?” I whispered back.

  “I think this way.” She took my arm in a friendly way and led me through the maze of aisles to a stairwell. Surprisingly it was only on
e flight down to the ground floor.

  We stepped out into a high-ceilinged reading room with windowed walls. Armchairs and couches were placed here and there, and there were a few people lounging in them with the thick leather books. Some were reading, while others simply stared out the windows at the kaleidoscopically changing view.

  To our right was a desk where a librarian dispensed books, which he got from a slot in the wall. He wore a short-sleeved white nylon shirt and baggy black pants. You could see the loops of his undershirt through the nylon. He motioned us over and we approached the counter.

  “Smooth Curves, Judy Schwartz,” he said pointing at my companion with his ball-point. Then at me, “The Lives of Felix Rayman, Felix Rayman.” His voice was high-pitched and a little mucous. Seeing our nods of confirmation he bent to inscribe the information on two file cards.

  I looked around the room a little more. Outside was…uh… Against a yellow background, a pattern of green vortices was moving past the windows. They grew tongues, purple tongues, and began licking. Two red blobs of light flew past… I decided to put the view on the back burner.

  In the center of the reading room was a smallish card catalog. A stooped man with a white beard was leafing through one of the loosely-packed drawers. “How many books do you have, anyway?” I asked the librarian.

  “If your two books were usable, that would make it two thousand four hundred and seventy-one.” I must have looked surprised, for he continued, “The Library of Forms is selective. We only house books whose theme is a basic category of human understanding, exhaustively treated. Partial, alien or idiosyncratic works are not of interest. We catalogue only those full and definitive treatments of significant forms actually occurring on Earth.”

  There was a hum, and a TV screen at his elbow lit up. It was the pony-tailed woman from upstairs. “The Smooth Curves book is complete, and will be usable if some random dots are erased. Send Ralph up to take care of it.”