Another question you might ask is, "Well, what source of knowledge are you actually tapping when you consult the hexagrams?" That's a better kind of question in that it doesn't force a wrong answer, but the answer is, again, indeterminate. You might view the I Ching as a sort of Rorschach bundle of squiggles that has no innate meaning but is useful because your own mind interprets it and puts sense into it. Feel free! You might think of it as a sort of memory bank of encoded lore. Why not? You might skip it entirely and come to knowledge in some other tao, any tao you like. ("The superior man understands the transitory in the light of the eternity of the end.") That's fine, too!
But whatever way you do it, you should do it that way. We needed inscribed bones to generate hexagrams, because that was the right way, and so it was no particular sacrifice to lop off a toe each for the purpose. It's working out nicely, except for one thing. The big hangup now is that the translations in the only book we have are so degraded, Chinese to German, German to English, and error seeping in at every step, and you bastards wouldn't transmit us the originals. Never mind. We'll make out.
Perhaps I will tell you more at another time. Not now. Not very soon. Eve will tell you all about that.
Eve Barstow, the Dummy, comes last and, I'm afraid, least.
When I was a little girl I used to play chess, badly, with very good players, and that's the story of my life. I'm a chronic overachiever. I can't stand people who aren't smarter and better than I am, but the result is that I'm the runt of the litter every time. They are all pretty nice to me here most of the time, even Jim, but they know what the score is and so do I.
So I keep busy, and applaud in them what I can't do myself. It isn't a bad life. I have everything I need, not counting pride.
Let me tell you what a typical day is like here between Sol and Centaurus. We wake up (if we have been sleeping, which most of us still do) and eat (if we are still eating, as all but Ski and, of course, Will Becklund do). The food is delicious and Florence has induced it to grow cooked and seasoned where that is desirable, so it's no trouble to go over and pick yourself a nice poached egg or a clutch of French fries. (I really prefer brioche in the mornings, but Flo can't manage them for, I think, some kind of sentimental reasons.) Sometimes we ball a little or sing old campfire songs. Ski comes down for that, but not for long, and then he goes back to looking at the universe. I don't see how he stands it. It almost burns out your eyes. The starburst is magnificent and appalling. One can always look in the other frequencies and see ghost stars before us and behind us, but in the birthright bands the view is just about dead black, and then that beautiful powdery ring of colored stars— and then the starburst. It will of course disappear when we slow down again, but right now it is exactly like plummeting right into the hottest pit of Hell.
Sometimes we write plays or have a little music. Shef deduced four lost Bach harpsichord concerti, very reminiscent of Corelli and Vivaldi, with everything going at once in the tuttis, and we've all adapted them for performance. I did mine on the Moog, but Ann and Shef synthesized whole orchestras. Shef's is particularly cute. You can tell that the flautist has early emphysema and two people in the violin section have been drinking, and he's got Toscanini conducting like a risorgimento metronome. Flo's oldest daughter made up words and now she sings a sort of nursery-rhyme adaptation of some Buxtehude chorales; oh, I didn't tell you about the kids. We have eleven of them now. Ann, Dot, and I have one apiece, and Florence has eight. (But they're going to let me have quadruplets next week.) They let me take care of them pretty much for the first few weeks, while they're little, and they're so darling.
So mostly I spend my time taking care of the kids and working out tensor equations that Ski kindly gives me to do for him and, I must confess it, feeling a little lonely. I would like to watch a TV quiz show over a cup of coffee with a friend! It's not what you'd call cozy around here. Though they do let me do over the interior of our mobile home now and then. The other day I redid it in Pittsburgh suburban just as a joke. Would you believe French windows in interstellar space? We can't open them, of course, but they look real pretty with the chintz curtains and lace tiebacks. And we've added several new rooms for the children and their pets. (Flo grew them the cutest little bunnies in the hydroponics plot; they're warm and they sort of breathe, but of course they don't hop or anything.)
Well, I've enjoyed this chance to gossip, but I'd better get to the point. I don't know why I'm the one who has to give you the bad news, but anyway let's get it over with.
None of the others are going to see what I'm transmitting to you. They simply aren't that interested anymore. There's a lot of other things they simply aren't, anymore, and, dear friends back home, I'm not a bit sure that one of those things isn't "human." I don't want to talk about it. But I don't like it, either, and you all should understand that the Will Becklund and the Sheffield Jackman and even the Eve Barstow you used to know simply do not exist anymore, and any assumptions you may make about what any of them, or us, will do are wholly at your own risk. More than that. You've been quite annoying. There's a lot of free-floating hostility around here that belongs to you.
For some time now the vibrations here have been pretty sour. You know how it is around the Cape when there's a hold, and then a slipback, and you don't know if the mission's scrubbed or not, and if it isn't you don't know if the damn bird's going to blow up on the pad, and the prime crews are missing sleep, and the backups are getting hopeful and grouchy and mostly all raw nerves, and the wives are yelling at the kids and locking themselves in the bedroom for a cry two or three times a day and wondering if a divorce would be, after all, all that much of a bad thing? I don't mean it was like that. I mean it was a million times worse than that. I mean, when something like that comes down at the Cape it's just your average all-American Joes and Sallys that are jumping out of their skins. We're not like that anymore. I mean, not even am I sweet little Eve anymore. And if any of us had any sweetness left, it sure dried up when we found out you were murdering us.
Oh, we're not dead—not counting Will, I mean. But that doesn't make all of you any less a pack of murderers.
So we found it out; and, oh, my dears, what a meeting we had after that! I'm not going to tell you some of the things we talked about doing. You don't want to know. And I don't think we're really going to do them, or anyway the worst of them, at least not right now. Probably.
But there's something we are going to do. Folks, you're all in Coventry. No talking anymore. The others have decided we don't want to get any more messages from you. They don't like the way you try to work on our subconsciouses and all (not that you succeed, of course, but you can see that it's still a little annoying), and so in future the dial will be set at six-six-oh, all right, but the switch will be in the "off" position. It wasn't my idea, but I was glad to go along. I would like some slightly less demanding company from time to time, although not, of course, yours.
14
ONCE UPON A TIME THE BUILDING THAT WAS NOW KNOWN as DoD Temp Restraining Quarters 7—you might as well call it with the right word, "jail," Knefhausen thought —had been a luxury hotel in the Hilton chain. He had once addressed a General Assembly of the World Future Society in its Grand Ballroom, not twenty yards from where he sat—such days! Such grand prospects! In those days the future was something one could contemplate with awe and joy. But now the rooms below the ground level, which had been for meetings and other frolicking, had become maximum security cells. There were no doors or windows to the outside. If you did storm out of the door of your own room in some way, you had then a flight of stairs to get up before you were at ground level, and then the guards to break through to get to the open streets, and then what? One had gained very little. Even if there happened not to be an active siege going on at the moment, one took one's chances with the roaming addicts and activists outside.