Now the intelligence fraternity has taken a great deal of abuse in recent years, and while I can hardly add a laurel to their brow, I ought to point out that they were often ahead of their time. By this I mean that they were among the first to suffer from the affliction primarily responsible for the disintegration of the modern personality — when the ability to collect information greatly outstrips our ability to make any sense of it. I myself must confess that I do not know of a single decision, personal or political, which can be improved by more information. The modern way to keep a secret secret is, after all, to surround it with trivia. Information makes it easier to mask real events and hide meaning. Ours is the age of ultimate, unobtrusive continual surveillance. Never before have so many been overheard and so much written down. Never before has behavior been so closely observed and recorded. And yet never in history was there a vaster contrast between the extraordinary precision of our diagnosis, and the recalcitrance of the data from which nothing could be learned, much less prognosticated. The most difficult thing in history is to ascertain motive, and you will not find me trying to account for it. As the great Dickens has said, “Most people cannot read character, and the greatest of all their mistakes is to mistake shyness for arrogance.”
In any event, when I came to make summaries of Iulus’s work for my aegis of superiors — the inter-office memo is truly the cruelest art form — pressure began to mount. Various directorates came into conflict. The Office of Damage Assessment dismissed it as magical fantasy. The Office of Imagery Analysis believed it to be enigmatically coded reality. Now you won’t catch me pulling that Anaxagorian banality, that the world is a mixture of the real and imagined. It’s simply that all war reminiscences are exchanges of the fake with the genuine, and it’s quite impossible to tell the difference. My final task was to divide it up on a “need-to-know” basis between our specialized warriors, and to elicit their cramped annalistic initials in the proper box. But boxes are boxes precisely because they are meant to convey something besides boxes, and they did not appreciate my reminding them of this.
For my own part, it was difficult to police a project in which I was so thoroughly engrossed. Indeed, intelligence-wise, within Iulus’s larger candor, there was no hidden conundrum, enigma, or agenda. The deeper one went into it, there seemed to be nothing but more tact and more discretion. Even the most worried reading revealed no breaches of faith or security; it resisted utterly any allegorical partiality. The most bizarre matters were related in the most matter-of-fact manner, as if to remind us that it is only the most fantastical tales which have direct historical equivalence, while it is the banal tissue of everyday documentary coherence which is totally fabricated. If you really believe you have made something up, it only means that you haven’t looked far enough, in my experience. “Imagination” is simply the relation of another person’s memory that can’t be exactly retrieved. There was nothing, you will notice, not even a proper name, which might compromise a personality, much less an agent. (In the summaries made by the lady copyists, every human and place name was left blank to be later written in by hand at a higher directorate.) Whatever else it was, this was no crank’s fiction or self-serving confessional. It addressed itself to the seniormost level, yet it wore its authority easily and remained accessible to the most peripheral of participants. Its sheer number of heroes and heroines might well overwhelm the dubious and jaded contemporary reader, but Iulus was the only man I knew who lived a truly fascinating life and wasn’t a boring writer. His work made you forget the injunction whereby you had come to read it — the highest praise you can give a document.
In all honesty I have forgotten in the press of other duties exactly how it was further processed. What I never forgot was the effect of the whole — as when you read too profound a book at too early an age, and all you can recall about it was that it required a new level of concentration, that brief and glorious lost time in everyone’s life, when you are watching yourself get smarter. I understand that this will sound of exclusivity to contemporary ears, but at my age I cannot muster a suitable self-effacing apologia. My trembling hand is quite democratic enough. These days, I rather go in for being misunderstood.
There is still no good explanation as to why a man who sprang from a people who loved silence above everything should suddenly come out of his commodious closet and reveal himself. The intelligence community, like the literary, remains divided on the issue; professors and spooks competing as usual for the lowest esteem of their fellow citizens, as they trawl literature for moral fishies.
Devotees of economic man speculated that his cash flow was cut off. The psychological fraternity inferred that he experienced a crise de conscience. The Third Estate believed the book to be a hedge against betrayal by his sources. And literary folk worried about his intentions, only to dismiss them as irrelevant. Their methods leave no leeway for a personality who remains a mystery but who was also unafraid of any ethical test. Some have said he was a greater man than a writer. Well, who isn’t?
But certainly he was not giving himself up or away. Only an American could believe in that sort of historical resolution. Pzalmanazar passed messages as most of us mere mortals pass water. And whatever we found of his, we “intercepted” it when he wanted us to.
I believed, in short, that the release of his papers was meant to mark the historical top in the snooze of the all-powerful. If Iulus was now fully awake, would it be long before, at long last, reality would step forward in America, all the contracts redrawn, and incredibility be recognized? It was time to cash out. Cannonia had a tryst with Destiny and her girlfriend Fate. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps and America comes into its tenth generation, Cannonia will wake to life and freedom.
So when the Company asked me to prepare a final digest, reduce his ten-thousand page opus to a bland four-page summary, I saw that any appreciation of Pzalmanazar imperiled simplification as well as my station. The sophistication of his observations simply could not be paraphrased. A memoir without hindsight? A meditation on the inherent wildness of history? A novel for people who hate novels?
It was finally conceded that the only man we could hire capable of tracking him down was himself. . and his code name was changed to “Lost King.” (None could spell or pronounce “Iulus” anyway.) It was as if our two selves were rushing to meet across history, but as I closed the distance and reached out my hand, I saw that he had been walking away from me backward the entire time. The best I could do was put real people into situations that probably did not exist, which after all is what history is all about. And so I reluctantly ran this summary up their flagpole:
Fellow Colleagues:
Even our disenchantment has definite limits. The mystery is not that the
documents in question offer knowledge which is largely unknown. The
mystery is that there is no knowledge to be known about them.
That snake in their lunchbucket cost me plenty. Having been routinely told to forget everything I learned, I resolved now to earn my pay by garrulating elaborately on what I had formerly denied I knew. But Iulus the author, if not the agent, was soon forgotten, and I, supposedly so severe and disinterested, controlled the files.
Don’t get the wrong idea, but yes, Traveler, I fell for him.