The Einstein Intersection (15 page)

James Agee/Letter to Father
Flye

Where is this country? How does one get there? If one is born lover with an innate philosophic bent, one will get there.

Plotinus
/
The
Intelligence, the Idea, and Being

Spider looked up from the desk
where he’d been reading. “I thought that would be you.”

In shadow behind him I saw the books. La Dire had owned some hundred. But the shelves behind him went from floor to ceiling.

“I want ... my money.” My eyes came back to the desk.

“Sit down,” Spider said. “I want to talk to you.”

“About what?”
I asked. Our voices echoed. The music was nearly silent. “I have to be on my way to get Friza, to find Kid Death.”

Spider nodded. “That’s why I suggest you sit down.” He pressed a button, and dust motes in the air defined a long cone of light that dropped to an onyx stool. I sat slowly, holding my blade. As he had once shifted the handle of his dragon whip from hand to hand, now he played with the bleached, fragile skull of some rodent. “What do you know about mythology, Lobey?”

“Only the stories that La Dire, one of the elders of my village, used to tell me. She told all the young people stories, some of them many times. And we told them to each other till they sank into memory. By then there were other children for her to tell.”

“Again, what do you know about mythology?-I’m not asking you what myths you know, nor even where they came from, but why we have them, what we use them for.”

“I... don’t know,” I said. “When I left my village, La Dire told me the myth of Orpheus.”

Spider held up the skull and leaned forward. “Why?”

“I don’t...” Then I thought.
“To guide me?”

I could offer nothing else. Spider asked, “Was La Dire different?”

“She was-
“ The
prurience that had riddled the laughter of the young people gaping at the poster came back to me; I did not understand it, still I felt the rims of my ears grow hot. I remembered the way Easy, Little Jon, and Lo Hawk had tried to brake my brooding over Friza; and how La Dire had tried, her attempt like theirs -yet different. “Yes,” I confessed, “she was.”

Spider nodded and rapped his rough knuckles on the desk. “Do you understand difference, Lobey?”

“I live in a different world, where many have it and many do not. I just discovered it in myself weeks ago. I know the world moves towards it with every pulse of the great rock and the great roll. But I don’t understand it.”

Through the eagerness on his drawn face Spider smiled. “In that you’re like the rest of us. All any of us knows is what it is not.”

“What isn’t it?” I asked.

“It isn’t telepathy; it’s not telekinesis-though both are chance phenomena that increase as difference increases. Lobey, Earth, the world, fifth planet from the sun-the species that stands on two legs and roams this thin wet crust: it’s changing, Lobey. It’s not the same. Some people walk under the sun and accept that
change,
others close their eyes, clap their hands to their ears and deny the world with their tongues. Most snicker, giggle, jeer and point when they think no one else is looking-that is how the humans acted throughout their history. We have taken over their abandoned world, and something new is happening to the fragments, something we can’t even define with mankind’s leftover vocabulary. You must take its importance exactly as that: it is indefinable; you are involved in it; it is wonderful, fearful, deep, ineffable to your explanations, opaque to your efforts to see through it; yet it demands you take journeys, defines your stopping and starting points, can propel you with love and hate, even to seek death for Kid Death-“

“-or make me make music,” I finished for him. “What are you talking about, Spider?”

“If I could tell you, or you could understand from my inferences, Lobey, it would lose all value. Wars and
chaoses
and paradoxes ago, two mathematicians between them ended an age and began another for our hosts, our ghosts called
Man.
One was Einstein, who with his Theory of Relativity defined the limits of man’s perception by expressing mathematically just how far the condition of the observer influences the thing he perceives.”

“I’m familiar with it,” I said.

“The other was
Godle
, a contemporary of Einstein, who was the first to bring back a mathematically precise statement about the vaster realm beyond the limits Einstein had defined: In any closed mathematical system-you may read ‘the real world with its immutable laws of logic’-there are an infinite number of true, theorems-you may read ‘perceivable, measurable phenomena’-which, though contained in the original system, can not be deduced from it- read ‘proven with ordinary or extraordinary logic.’
Which is to say, there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Lo Lobey-o.
There are an infinite number of true things in the world with no way of ascertaining their truth. Einstein defined the extent of the rational.
Godle
stuck a pin into the irrational and fixed it to the wall of the universe so that it held still long enough for people to know it was there. And the world and humanity began to change. And from the other side of the universe, we were drawn slowly here. The visible effects of Einstein’s theory leaped up on a convex curve, its production huge in the first century after its discovery, then leveling off. The production of
Godle’s
law crept up on a concave curve, microscopic at first, then leaping to equal the Einsteinian curve, cross it, outstrip it. At the point of intersection, humanity was able to reach the limits of the known universe with ships and projection forces that are still available to anyone who wants to use them-“

“Lo Hawk,” I said. “Lo Hawk went on a journey to the other worlds-“

“-and when the line of
Godle’s
law eagled over Einstein’s, its shadow fell on a deserted Earth. The humans had gone somewhere else, to no world in this continuum. We came, took their bodies, their souls-both husks abandoned here for any wanderer’s taking. The cities, once bustling centers of interstellar commerce, were crumbled to the sands you see today. And they were once greater than Branning-at-sea.”

I thought a moment. “That must have taken a long time,” I said slowly.

“It has,” Spider said. “The City we crossed is perhaps thirty thousand years old. The sun has captured two more planets since the Old People began here.”

“And the source-cave?”
I suddenly asked. “What was the source-cave?”

“Didn’t you ever ask your elders?”

“Never thought to,” I said.

“It’s a net of caves that wanders beneath most of the planet, and the lower levels contain the source of the radiation by which the villages, when their populations become too stagnant, can set up a controlled random jumbling of genes and chromosomes.
Though we have not used that for almost a thousand years.
Though the radiation is still there.
As we,
templated
on man, become more complicated creatures, the harder it is for us to remain perfect: there is more variation among the
normals
and the kages fill with rejects. And here you are, now, Lobey.”

“What does this all have to do with mythology?” I was weary of his monologue.

“Recall my first question.”

“What do I know of mythology?”

“And I want a
Godelian
, not an Einsteinian answer. I don’t want to know what’s inside the myths, nor how they clang and set one another ringing, their glittering focuses, their limits and genesis. I want their shape, their texture, how they feel when you brush by them on a dark road, when you see them receding into the fog, their weight as they leap your shoulder from behind; I want to know how you take to the idea of carrying three when you already bear two. Who are you, Lobey?”

“I’m . . . Lobey?” I asked. “La Dire once called me
Ringo
and Orpheus.”

Spider’s chin rose. His fingers, caging the bone face, came together. “Yes, I thought so. Do you know who I am?”

“No.”

“I’m Green-eye’s Iscariot. I’m Kid Death’s Pat Garrett. I’m Judge
Minos
at the gate,
whom
you must charm with your music before you can even go on to petition the Kid. I’m every traitor you’ve imagined. And I’m a baron of dragons, trying to support two wives and ten children.”

“You’re a big man, Spider.”

He nodded. “What do you know of mythology?”

“Now that’s the third time you’ve asked me.” I picked up my blade. From the grinding love that wanted to serenade his silences-the music had all stopped-I leaned the blade against my teeth.

“Bite through the shells of my meanings, Lobey. I know so much more than you. The guilty have the relief of knowledge.” He held the skull over the table. I thought he was offering it to me. “I know where you can find Friza. I can let you through the gate.
Though Kid Death may kill me.

I want you to know that. He is younger, crueler, and much stronger. Do you want to go on?”

I dropped my blade. “It’s fixed!” I said. “I’ll fail! La Dire said Orpheus failed. You’re trying to tell me that these stories tell us just what is going to happen. You’ve been telling me we’re so much older than we think we are; this is all schematic for a reality I can’t change! You’re telling me right now that I’ve failed as soon as I start.”

“Do you believe that?”

“That’s what you’ve said.”

“As we are able to retain more and more of our past, it takes us longer and longer to become old; Lobey, everything changes. The labyrinth today does not follow the same path it did at Knossos fifty thousand years ago. You may be Orpheus; you may be someone else, who dares death and succeeds. Green-eye may go to the tree this evening, hang there, rot, and never come down. The world is not the same. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. It’s different.”

“But-“

“There’s just as much suspense today as there was when the first singer woke from his song to discover the worth of the concomitant sacrifice. You don’t know, Lobey. This all may be a false note, at best a passing dissonance in the harmonies of the great rock and the great roll.”

I thought for a while. Then I said, “I want to run away.”

Spider nodded. “Some mason set the double-headed
labrys
on the stones at
Pheistos
. You carry a two edge knife that sings. One wonders if
Theseus
built the maze as he wandered through it.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, defensive and dry. “The stories give you a law to follow-“

“-that you can either break or obey.”

“They set you a goal-“

“-and you can
either fail
that goal, succeed, or surpass it.”

“Why?” I demanded. “Why can’t you just ignore the old stories? I’ll go on plumb the
sea,
find the Kid without your help. I can ignore those tales! “

“You’re living in the real world now,” Spider said sadly. “It’s come from something. It’s going to something. Myths always lie in the most difficult places to ignore. They confound all family love and hate. You shy at them on entering or exiting any endeavor.” He put the skull on the table. “Do you know why the Kid needs you as much as he needs Green-eye?”

I shook my head.

“I do.”

“The Kid needs me?”

“Why do you think you’re here?”

“Is the reason... different? “

“Primarily.
Sit back and listen.” Spider himself leaned back in his chair. I stayed where I was. “The Kid can change anything in the range of his intelligence. He can make a rock into a tree, a mouse into a handful of moss. But he cannot create something from nothing. He cannot take this skull and leave a vacuum. Green-eye can. And that is why the Kid needs Green-eye.”

I remembered the encounter on the mountain where the malicious redhead had tried to tempt the depthless vision of the herder-prince.

“The other thing he needs is music, Lobey.”

“Music?”

“
This is why he is chasing you
-or making you
chase
him. He needs order. He needs patterning, relation, the knowledge that comes when six notes predict a seventh, when three notes beat against one another and define a mode, a melody defines a scale. Music is the pure language of temporal and co-temporal relation. He knows nothing of this, Lobey. Kid Death can control, but he cannot create, which is why he needs Green-eye. He can control, but he cannot order. And that is why he needs you.”

“But how-?”

“Not in any way your village vocabulary or my urban refinement can state.
Differently, Lobey.
Things passing in a world of difference have their surrealistic corollaries in the present. Green-eye creates, but it is an oblique side effect of something else. You receive and conceive music; again only an oblique characteristic of who you are-“

“Who am I?”

“You’re... something else.”

My question had contained a demand. His answer held a chuckle.

“But he needs you both,” Spider went on. “What are you going to give him?”

“My knife in his belly till blood floods the holes and leaks out the mouthpiece. I’ll chase the sea-floor till we both fall on sand. I-
“ My
mouth opened; I suddenly sucked in dark air so hard it hurt my chest. “I’m afraid,” I whispered. “Spider, I’m afraid.”

“Why?”

I looked at him behind the evenly blinking lids of his black eyes. “Because I didn’t realize I’m alone in this.” I slid my hands together on the hilt. “If I’m to get Friza,

I have to go alone-not with her love, but without it. You’re not on my side.” I felt my voice roughen, not with fear. It was the sadness that starts in the back of the throat and makes you cough before you start crying. “If I reach Friza, I don’t know what I’ll have, even if I get her.”

Spider waited for my crying. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. So after a while he said, “Then I guess I can let you through, if you really know that.”