Next to the ladder, by the chart table, he found matches and alcohol. He carefully brought a little cupful of the alcohol to a small coal stove mounted on a bulkhead at the other end of the cabin and poured the alcohol over some charcoal briquets inside. On the picture-book shore out there everything was done by magic. They got their heat and electricity without even thinking about it. But in this little floating world, whatever you needed you had to get for yourself.
He lit a match, tossed it in and watched the alcohol go Pouf! and fill the stove with a pale, blue-purple flame. He was glad he’d loaded the stove yesterday. He wouldn’t want to have to do it now… Was that just yesterday? It seemed like a week…
He closed the stove door, watched it for a moment until out of the corner of his eye he saw an enormous suitcase that he had never seen before.
Where did that come from? he wondered.
It wasn’t his.
Lila must have brought it with her.
He thought about it as he struck another match at a gimballed brass kerosene lamp. He adjusted the wick until the flame seemed right. Then he turned off the overhead electric light and sat down on the berth under the lamp, his back against a rolled sleeping bag.
As far as he could figure he must have made some sort of deal with her to come on the boat or she wouldn’t have brought this suitcase.
Now the kerosene light glowed over all the wood and bronze and brass and fabric shapes of the cabin and another invisible glow of warmth came from the black coal stove that now made cricking heating noises. Soon it would heat everything enough to make it all comfortable.
Except for that suitcase. What was coming back to mind wasn’t making him comfortable at all. He remembered she’d dropped the suitcase on Rigel’s deck. Really hard. When they walked across to come aboard he’d turned and told her to keep it quiet. He remembered she shouted, Don’t you tell me to keep it quiet! in a voice you could hear all over the harbor.
It was all coming back: going over to her boat, waiting for her to pack, listening to her talk about that dirty double-crosser George and his whore, Debbie.
Oh-oh.
He guessed it couldn’t be so bad, though. Just a couple of days into Manhattan and then she would be gone. No harm done.
He saw that her suitcase had shoved all his trays of slips over to one side of the pilot berth. They were for a book he was working on and one of the four long card-catalog-type trays was by an edge where it could fall off. That’s all he needed, he thought, about three thousand four-by-six slips of note pad paper all over the floor.
He got up and adjusted the sliding rest inside each tray so that it was tight against the slips and they couldn’t fall out. Then he carefully pushed the trays back into a safer place in the rear of the berth. Then he went back and sat down again.
It would actually be easier to lose the boat than it would be to lose those slips. There were about eleven thousand of them. They’d grown out of almost four years of organizing and reorganizing and reorganizing so many times he’d become dizzy trying to fit them all together. He’d just about given up.
Their overall subject he called a Metaphysics of Quality, or sometimes a Metaphysics of Value, or sometimes just MOQ to save time.
The buildings out there on shore were in one world and these slips were in another. This slip-world was quite a world and he’d almost lost it once because he hadn’t written any of it down and incidents came along that had destroyed his memory of it. Now he had reconstructed what seemed like most of it on these slips and he didn’t want to lose it again.
But maybe it was a good thing that he had lost it because now, in the reconstruction of it, all sorts of new material was flooding in — so much that his main task was to get it processed before it log-jammed his head into some kind of a block that he couldn’t get out of. Now the main purpose of the slips was not to help him remember anything. It was to help him to forget it. That sounded contradictory but the purpose was to keep his head empty, to put all his ideas of the past four years on that pilot berth where he didn’t have to think of them. That was what he wanted.
There’s an old analogy to a cup of tea. If you want to drink new tea you have to get rid of the old tea that’s in your cup, otherwise your cup just overflows and you get a wet mess. Your head is like that cup. It has a limited capacity and if you want to learn something about the world you should keep your head empty in order to learn it. It’s very easy to spend your whole life swishing old tea around in your cup thinking it’s great stuff because you’ve never really tried anything new, because you could never get it in, because the old stuff prevented its entry because you were so sure the old stuff was so good, because you never really tried anything new… on and on in an endless circular pattern.
The reason Phædrus used slips rather than full-sized sheets of paper is that a card-catalog tray full of slips provides a more random access. When information is organized in small chunks that can be accessed and sequenced at random it becomes much more valuable than when you have to take it in serial form. It’s better, for example, to run a post office where the patrons have numbered boxes and can come in to access these boxes any time they please. It’s worse to have them all come in at a certain time, stand in a queue and get their mail from Joe, who has to sort through everything alphabetically each time and who has rheumatism, is going to retire in a few years, and who doesn’t care whether they like waiting or not. When any distribution is locked into a rigid sequential format it develops Joes that dictate what new changes will be allowed and what will not, and that rigidity is deadly.
Some of the slips were actually about this topic: random access and Quality. The two are closely related. Random access is at the essence of organic growth, in which cells, like post-office boxes, are relatively independent. Cities are based on random access. Democracies are founded on it. The free market system, free speech, and the growth of science are all based on it. A library is one of civilization’s most powerful tools precisely because of its card-catalog trays. Without the Dewey Decimal System allowing the number of cards in the main catalog to grow or shrink at any point the whole library would soon grow stale and useless and die.
And so while those trays certainly didn’t have much glamour they nevertheless had the hidden strength of a card catalog. They ensured that by keeping his head empty and keeping sequential formatting to a minimum, no fresh new unexplored idea would be forgotten or shut out. There were no ideological Joes to kill an idea because it didn’t fit into what he was already thinking.
Because he didn’t pre-judge the fittingness of new ideas or try to put them in order but just let them flow in, these ideas sometimes came in so fast he couldn’t write them down quickly enough. The subject matter, a whole metaphysics, was so enormous the flow had turned into an avalanche. The slips kept expanding in every direction so that the more he saw the more he saw there was to see. It was like a Venturi effect which pulled ideas into it endlessly, on and on. He saw there were a million things to read, a million leads to follow… too much… too much… and not enough time in one life to get it all together. Snowed under.
There’d been times when an urge surfaced to take the slips, pile by pile, and file them into the door of the coal stove on top of the glowing charcoal briquets and then close the door and listen to the cricking of the metal as they turned into smoke. Then it would all be gone and he would be really free again.