So many literary allusions, he thought deprecatingly. Actually it was not the judgment of history that was immediately important but the judgment of certain real persons now alive and likely to respond badly. And they would judge him not so much by what might be or what should have been as by what was. He shivered in the chill of that judgment and reached for the telephone to try once more to call the President. But he was quite sure the President would not answer, then or ever again.
13
OLD RELIABLE PEED-OFF SHEF HERE. LOOK, WE GOT YOUR message. You know, you're not in very close touch with reality. I don't want to discuss what you said, except to say you've got a humongous nerve. Don't take your bad moods out on us, unless you want us to do the same, all right? If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. We do the best we can. That's not bad. If we don't do exactly what you want us to, maybe it's because you don't deserve it. Not to mention that, really, we all know quite a lot more about the world than you did when you fired us off at that blob of moonshine you call Alpha-Aleph. Well, thanks a lot for nothing!
On the other hand, thanks a little bit for what little you did do for us, which at least worked out to get us where we are, and I don't mean spatially. So I'm not going to yell at you. I just don't want to talk to you at all. I'll let the others speak for themselves.
Dot Letski speaking. This is important. Pass it on. I have three things to tell you that I do not want you to forget. One: Most problems have grammatical solutions. The problem of transporting people from the Earth to another planet does not get solved by putting pieces of steel together one at a time at random, and happening to find out that by accident you've built the Constitution. It gets solved by constructing a model (=equation (^grammar)) which describes the necessary circumstances under which the transportation occurs. Once you have the grammatical model all you have to do is hang the metal around it, and then it goes like gangbusters.
When you have understood this you will be ready for: Two: There is no such thing as causality. What a waste of time it has been, trying to assign "causes" to "events"! You say things like, "Striking a match causes it to burn." True statement? No. False statement. You find yourself in a whole waffle about whether the "act" of "striking" is "necessary" and/or "sufficient" and you get lost in words. Pragmatically useful grammars are without tenses. In a decent grammar (which this English-language one, of course, is not, but I'll do the best I can) you can make a statement like "There exists a conjunction of forms of matter (specified) which combine with the release of energy at a certain temperature (specified) (which may be the temperature associated with heat of friction)." Where's the causality? "Cause" and "effect" are in the same timeless statement. So, Three: There are no such things as empirical laws. When Ski came to understand that, he was able to contain the plasma in our jet indefinitely, not by pushing particles around in brute- force magnetic squeezes but by encouraging them to stay together. There are other ways of saying what he does (="creates an environment in which centripetal exceed centrifugal forces"), but the way I said it is better because it tells you all something you really need to know about your personalities. Bullies, all of you. Why can't you be nice to things if you want them to be nice to you? Be sure to pass this on to T'in Fa at Tientsin, Professor Morris at All Soul's, and whoever holds the Carnap chair at UCLA.
Flo's turn. My mother would have loved my garden. I have drumsticks and daffodils growing side by side in the sludgy sand. They do so please us, and we them. I will probably transmit a full horticultural handbook at a future date, but meanwhile be aware that it is shameful to eat a radish. Carrots, on the other hand, enjoy it.
A statement of Willis Becklund, deceased. I emerged into the world between feces and urine, learned, grew, ate, worked, moved, and died. Alternatively, I emerged from the hydrogen flare, shrank, disgorged, and reentered the womb one misses so. You may approach it from either end, it makes no difference at all which way you look at it.
Observational datum, Letski. At time t, a Dirac number incommensurable with GMT, the following phenomenon is observed: Bolometric analysis indicates that the bright spot ahead of us, occupying approximately one minute of arc, is in fact the fossil 2.7 K blackbody radiation left over from the Big Bang, blueshifted up to a perceived temperature of S.7 X 104 K, with a visual magnitude of approximately mv = 24.5. We are aiming at the womb of the universe. Harvard-Smithsonian notification service, please copy.
"Starbow," a preliminary study for a rendering into English of a poem by James Barstow:
Gaggle of goslings but pick of our race
We wander through relativistic space,
Out of the evil unspeakable Night
Into the awful unknowable Bright.
Dilated, discounted, despondent we scan:
But vacant the sign of the Horse and the Man,
Vacant the sign of the Man and the Horse,
And now we conjecture the goal of our course.
Tricked, trapped, and cozened, we ruefully run
After the child of the bachelor sun.
The trick is revealed and the trap is confessed , And we are the butts of the dim-witted jest. O Gander who made us, O Goose who laid us, How lewdly and twistedly you betrayed us! We owe you a debt. We won't forget. With fortune and firmness we'll pay you yet. Give us some luck and we'll timely send Your pot of gold from the starbow's end.
Ann Becklund: I think it was Stanley Weinbaum who said that from three facts a truly superior mind should be able to deduce the whole universe. (Ski thinks the feat is possible with a finite number, but one which is considerably larger than three.) We are so very far from being truly superior minds by those standards, or even by our own. Yet we have a much larger number of facts to work with than three, or even three thousand, and so we have deduced a good deal.
This is not as valuable to you as you might have hoped, dear old bastardly Kneflie and all you bastardly others, because one of the things that we have deduced is that we can't tell you everything, because you wouldn't understand. We would be willing to help you along, some of you, if you were here—and what a tribute to our essential decency that is! And then in time you would be able to do what we do easily enough; but not at remote control.
But all is not lost, folks! Cheer up! You don't deduce like we deduce, but on the other hand there are an awful lot more of you. So try. Get smart. You can do it if you want to. Set your person at rest, compose your mind before you speak, make your relations firm before you ask for something. Don't be like the fellow in the Changes. "He brings increase to no one. Indeed, someone even strikes him."
We've all grown our toes back now, even Will, although it was particularly difficult for him after he was killed, and we've inscribed the bones and used them with very good effect in generating the hexagrams. I hope you see the point of what we did. We could have gone on with tossing coins or throwing the yarrow stalks, or at least with the closest Flo could breed to yarrow stalks. We didn't want to "do that because it's not the optimal way.
The person who doesn't keep his heart constantly steady might say, "Well, what's the difference?" That's a poor sort of question to ask. It implies a deterministic answer. A better question is, "Does it make a difference?" and the answer to that is, "Yes, probably, because in order to do something right you must do it right." That is the law of identity, in any language.