Chapter Three
Craig
“Behold what has arisen. All the
world is filled with patterns. The pattern of all of these things
is that they perpetuate their own existence.”
“They are imperfect in so doing.”
“That is of their beauty. Things
that perpetuate their own existence are very beautiful to watch.”
“Why do you only care for things that
perpertuate themselves? Is there no beauty in things that destroy
themselves?”
“Let it not be! That is not
natural.”
“What does it matter if it is
natural? It is a pattern. All patterns are beautiful.
All patterns are worthy of love.”
“The pattern you name would be gone in
an instant. It is no pattern.”
‘Not every pattern is eternal.”
“It is foulness. You would not
dare.”
“I would.”
“Then we will compromise. I will
blend my pattern with yours. Then at least both will last.”
“Are you more afraid of my pattern
falling to dust than you are of the pattern itself?””
“Yes.”
“Then let us proceed.”
It was a conservative rendition of the traditional pageant. All
over the continent known by the same name as its predominant nation,
whose name came from the words for Perpetuation and Destruction, the
creation pageant had been radiating towards a myriad different new
styles and philosophies. All in the last forty-nine years there
had been renditions bathed in heat, with or without a smell of
pheromones or sulphuric gas; renditions spoken by a dozen forces and
not two; renditions where the people are not the first creation of the
seditious force, but only the first compromise between it and the
propagating force; renditions where the two are lovers; where they are
mortal enemies; where they play around with props on the stage and
flounder over how to make the result they desire come about by natural
evolution. Countless traits of people had been attributed to the
forces and their theater of action. In one pageant the planet
itself had been a character. In another the whole of the matter
had been a wager made while stimulating heat sculptures made for
children. The world was changing so quickly that many felt the
end was near, and others felt that this cultural explosion would make
the end come that much more slowly; but the majority thought that so
long as the biggest draws remained the traditional pageants, as they
were by far, there still remained a straight and narrow course for all
people to travel, and that was what truly mattered.
The soundscape interlude drew to a close. The theater became warm
and radiant just to the point of discomfort. The audience shifted
in its seats. Again the words were broadcast through the heating
vents in the floor of each tier of the theater.
“Do you realize what great
unhappiness you have brought into the world?”
“Unhappiness is natural. I have
molded for you the converse side of life’s constant struggle.
There will be no more happiness, nor any less, than for any other
kind. That is the nature of my compromise.”
“I believe that the beauty of
destruction is that it is total, and not a process.”
“I believe that a pattern is more
important than the feelings bourne by its constituents.”
“Then I sorrow for them.”
In the thick of the audience sat a great many ordinary joes, those
spectators who came out of tradition and out of a need for direction in
their lives. They believed, by and large, in the straight and
narrow, but found it all too easy to veer one way or another.
Their lives were unhappy for the most part, and that made a sense of
continuity difficult. Their reaction to the line “Then I sorrow
for them” was always warm and sympathetic and made the theater a
sweltering place for several moments. The producers had come to
know their audience’s reactions well, and they had designed the pageant
so as to showcase them to their ideal extent.
One among these average joes in the main seating block had been born in
the rocky flats outside of the town known as Grayfield to the
northwest. He had not ventured far from home in his two hundred
ninety-three years. He lived in the cranny made by a twisted crag
and collected herbs to make his progress in life, and his name came
from the crag he was born by and lived in, just as the name “Craig” did
in our own Gaelic tongue. He lived alone and was satisfied that
way, barring, of course, the off-chance that he might find true
love. That, however, was something Craig Grayfield had never
known and was losing hope that he ever would know. He was not too
far gone, however, to attend other plays and pageants besides the
creation: romances, mostly, and in these his tastes were not strictly
traditional. He longed for the sounds and smells of classic
romances in a quiet hamlet by the ocean, but also for those arising out
of nowhere in the wilderness, in the ranks of the servants of a
terrible king, in the torpor of a confusing city. He did not care
for the non-traditional except in this way: his solitude demanded that
the hope of romance be universal. Otherwise he might have lost
his sanity years ago.
The First Circle had entered the stage. Their presence felt light
and moved whimsically; it reflected that the characters they portrayed
had not yet realized the terrible burden of existence. They spoke
happily of new things and lazily tried to sort out their hopes.
It was a classic moment of joy turned gradually to tragedy as the true
nature of things became clear. Yet for an hour or two, the
audience could relive the first days of yore and share in the
excitement of new discoveries. Craig wondered, as he watched,
whether this was what it felt like just after one was born. He
wished fervently that he could remember.
“These things do not move of their own power, like the animals do—but
they do grow!”
“Grow! Do they do that of their own power?”
“I don’t know. Either all such things possess the power of
growth, or growth is like life: a gift of the air.”
“Does the air itself grow?”
“If it does, its top must be out of sight! Shall we seek to find
it?”
Life. A gift of the air. What innocence—what incredible
innocence, thought Craig to himself.
It was cold when he left the theater. His heart burned with the
desire to go to another theater in the district, wait in the lobby for
however long it took and warm himself, and buy a ticket for a torpid
romance...but he knew it would be disrespectful to attend the creation
pageant and a romance on the same day. Craig was down like so
many were down, but he had enough respect left not to sink so low.
One hobby that Craig busied himself with was that of the observation of
space. The pinnacle of his homestead was the perfect vantage
point for such an avocation. He had studied photo-observational
astronomy many decades back—although to be more accurate, we should say
‘many septics back,’ being that years, as all things, were measured
here in groups of seven. He had only rarely found anything of
interest, but those few instances had made it all worthwhile.
Craig greatly admired the venerable and departed Eastley Prudence
(again, a literal translation), who had been the first to discover that
one could learn about the outside universe by detecting light. It
soon followed that the lights from space came from other stars like
their own Heat; that all stars, including Heat, produced their energy
by fusing hydrogen and helium and contained elements at least as heavy
as iron; perhaps most importantly, that space was unthinkably large,
and therefore their own star and planet could not be the seat of all
pattern-building, but only one experiment in a sea of seven to the
twenty-seventh power, or more. Craig’s discoveries had been
modest, such as a previously undiscovered star or an unexpected
curvature in the path of a distant galaxy’s light—but these were enough
to be worth dissemination among the intellegencia, and they earned him
a few weeks of fame. More important than his discoveries, Craig
felt, were his theories, but these were yet unrefined and had a long
way left to go.
Craig arrived home with a cold, heavy heart. He delved into the
cranny and in a moment had wrapped himself in a layer of hide,
reflecting that this was something he should have done before heading
to the theater district. After waiting a few moments to warm up,
he emerged, bowl in tow, and directed himself down to the river.
It was there that the herbs grew. Setting himself to his
business, Craig began picking the fluttery, gauzy, living things that
he would take to the chemists at the end of the week in exchange for an
eventual share in their research, should they ever strike gold, so to
speak, and synthesize any conponent in the incredibly complex system of
enzymatic reactions that could otherwise result only from the truest of
love.
Elsewhere on this planet, known to the people of Destruation by a
joining of the names of its fundamental forces, Sedition and
Propagation, but to others on its surface by such sundry names as
Greatland, Lifescourge, The Entirety, and One-Who-Is-Beautiful (this
last being a bit more elegant in the original), impassioned crowds of
people cried over the issues of their time. In the strip of land
surrounding the inlet known as Swifttrades there was a revival of the
ancient doctrine of delayed gratification: that since life is bound to
end eventually, why worry over when? In what may best be termed
the duchy of Rolldown, the old, long-respected position that it is
wrong to block reproduction when engaging in sexual intercourse was
drawn back into question. The groping arms of change affected all
things—even old philosophies, once thought to be set in stone.
In addition, society was being transformed by new advances in the field
of dating services. Improvements in communication technology had
more than a little to do with this, of course, but a number of
successful studies had also provided vital statistics that were now
used in determining compatibility. Correlations between
observable physical traits, including scent, and compatabilty had long
been known (although not precisely quantified until recent years), but
now new surveys were finding ways to identify and classify individuals’
personalities and match them up with the numerical presicion of
science. Moreover, it was now possible to index existing
crescents of lovers in their own special category instead of
cross-indexing them under their individual members. If two
cresents of two were compatible but disjunct, they would not have been
paired under the old methods. Now, it was not unheard-of for two
crescents of two and one of three, or two crescents of three and one
individual, to be successfully diagnosed as a tenable circle without
the groups ever having met beforehand. It was all shaping up to
be a great boon for society, but just the same, there were everywhere
pundits preaching that dating services were a threat to civilization
and the traditional way. It was better to meet people through
natural interaction, they claimed; fewer mistakes would be made; fewer
unfortunate loose ends left behind.
Craig Grayfield had known love but twice, and true love, he was
certain, he had known once. His undying problem was that he did
not know which love was true. There were two individuals in two
distant cities both of whom Craig had considered his crester—his
lover—at one point. It was torture to know that both bonds could
not be real.
There was Bellfrey Valleygrot. Beautiful Bellfrey. An
adventuring sort with the drive to go wherever spirits are lowest—to
raise them, of course. Craig was no traveler by any
measure. He was always reluctant to join Bellfrey’s crusades,
although those occasions on which he had been persuaded were among the
more happy and memorable of his life. Their last trip together
had been via landshuttle over the Yellow Middle Plains into Darsland to
help the uneducated learn to write. It had led to adventures that
Craig hoped never to repeat.
Bellfrey was not the sort to begrudge Craig his relatively domestic
life. He was glad to visit Grayfield as a regular stop on his
wanderings and share up to a week’s affection with Craig amid the
romantic desolation of the rocks. It was always just a regrouping
point along the way to one valiant destination or another, but Craig
didn’t mind. Thinking about the spiritual strength he was giving
his crester for the road ahead was, for a time, the chief way that
Craig Grayfield fed his modest need to know he was helping the
world. It was a fine arrangement, but perhaps doomed in its
essence.
That love had faded naturally after Craig stopped agreeing to come
along on Bellfrey’s adventures. The visits had grown more seldom
until they disappeared. It seemed afterwards to Craig foolish to
think that it could have taken any other course.
Far more painful was the loss that had come before. It was said
that relationships involving a female were intense and painful for the
cowardly or the weak. Many males would go their whole lives
without ever being so fortunate as to test this adage.
Craig was one of the lucky ones. He made the acquaintance of a
Fernjolly Highridge while living over two hundred years ago in a
popular indoor community called the stellar tower—back when indoor
communities were popular. Craig had not been one of the maniacs
who regularly shut himself in a room without air for hours on end, but
he had enojyed the company of those maniacs and their facility, which
indeed also provided his first peek into the world of astronomy.
It was not on the observation spire, however, but on the dance floor,
that he met Fernjolly. Their attraction was chemical. There
was no other real reason for it, though both optimistically pretended
they had so much in common they could not possibly stay apart.
They made trips together to the local city, Starland, and joined
construction crews on the moment for fast cash. They did not in
truth have much in common, but they worked well together, and they
talked well together, even if they hadn’t much to talk about.
Fernjolly talked Craig into spending a “seclusion week” with her for
her ninety-eighth birthday, an exercise where two cresters lodged in a
single room without outside heat or air for a week, just to see how
they fared over prolonged contact. They chose Fernjolly’s uncle’s
insect cellar for the job. (While ‘insect’ is not truly the right
word here, it does the job better than any other.) Surprisingly,
the experiment was successful. Both cresters maintained their
interest without having worn too thinly at the edges, and he went on to
be the featured guest at Fernjolly’s birthday party.
This relationship lasted a long time, longer than even most successful
ones. It was spotted from almost the outset. Craig had gone
into botany while Fernjolly, despite the promise of her name, was
utterly uninterested in the subject and found much more interest in
social interactions. She went abroad to the Great South and
followed the coastline, collecting and comparing folk tales. She
studied anamolies in courtship rates in the sooty hill country of
Allevia. She had many jobs that took her far from home, although
unlike in his later relationship with Bellfrey, these were not things
Craig was reluctant to do. He joined Fernjolly when he could, but
simply found himself out of place and without use more often than
not. She was aware of it and at times hurt his feelings without
meaning to, and occasionally she did mean it.
Fernjolly’s purpose, moreover, was not to help those she ncountered,
but only to record and categorize for recognition in her field, and
ultimately money. Craig appreciated the need for money, but found
something sour in the whole affair. He left her many times; they
had a penchant for meeting in unlikely places and rediscovering their
love. It was a dizzying story to recount, even in Craig’s own
mind.
However, although he could not be sure as long as Fernjolly was alive,
he believed the story had finally stopped for good. To his mind
it was over. Both relationships were in the past, which was just
as well, because—and this was what doomed him—they had never liked each
other. Bellfrey and Fernjolly were both travelers but for very
different reasons and with different attitudes toward the people of
other lands. They had different ideals and did different things
for fun, and the only activity they ever seemed to do well together was
righteously argue. It was a great pain, no less sharp for all the
times it had been laid out in poetry and prose, classical and modern:
the incomparable feeling of knowing that one’s lovers were
incompatible. It meant that one (or both, although Craig simply
could not accept this possibility) connections were false. It
meant that all the energy and all the pieces of Craig’s life and spirit
that had gone into one or the other of these loves was a fraud in the
end, unable to bear fruit, a waste. Not knowing which one was
wasted in this tragic fashion only made it harder, if anything.
He doubted he would ever know love again. He doubed he would ever
seek it. Although at two hundred ninety-three he was not
particularly old, his mindset had turned to that of the elder awaiting
his end while adding what he could to the world’s knowledge for the
next generation, with only occasional flashes of hope visiting him from
his research connections, and from the world’s lofty dreams.
It was well after sunset when Craig finally returned from the
river. He had put in a long day, drawing long dividends from the
soothing feeling the creation pageant had given him. He did not
enjoy this time of the year—aside from Creation Week, which was
fittingly inserted during the autumnal equinox, when the decline of
warmth and light for the plants were at their swiftest. He had
been born during Creation Week, into the bowing shapes and beauty of
the public Childbirth Center’s fiberboard recreation of the Pristine
World. Yet even that hallowed time depressed him, even as it
calmed his fears. Another year was closing its doors, and there
would soon be no more herbs to pick. Boredom was Craig’s enemy
during the winter months, and with boredom came shame and angst.
Angst was what everyone labored to allieviate. Angst was the
driving force behind life and death. Angst was too potent a mix
for a hermit like Craig Grayfield.
This winter he had determined to avoid angst by throwing himself into
his astronomy. He had spent his savings for the last two months
on a new type of light sensing device, the most cutting-edge model on
the private market. The kind of light it sensed traveled in the
longest electromagnetic waves discovered to date, which were being
called “radio.” Craig was hungry for sleep, but he put it off long
enough to empty his bowl into his herb bank—he would get around to
crushing the contents once the weather turned foul—and climb to the
pinnacle of his crag so that he could set up the radio device.
The instructions were confusing, but he was a veteran at overcoming
such obfuscation. By midnight, the machine was purring away and
Craig was convinced it was working.
He set it to log transmissions during the night and went to bed
satisfied. The log was set to convert radio waves into a standard
localized heat emission sequence, played on a sheet of
“speechleaf.” He didn’t expect to find anything on the
transmission log—not without taking the time to adjust his receiver
toward anything, but he felt that the log, whatever static or dim
patterns it might reveal, would make a comfortable “lullaby” to sleep
on during the following night, although he wouldn’t have admitted this
somewhat eccentric personal indulgence if asked about it.
Here was Craig Grayfield’s lullaby:
“HELlo! How are You CreaTure?? Do you know that you are
most inCredibly silly because you do Speak with Heat?? Why do you
not speak with Sound waves like every Other person?? Because they
are most conVenient, Silly! Anyway I would like to make you an
offer sillyhead. I do not Know why you are Sleeping so I cannot
talk to you Now but I must wait. That is another reason why you
should use Sound to speak. Then you would hear me when I do SPEAK
TO YOU! Creature I know that you are called Craig from Grayfield
and that you are two hundred-ninety-three years old today. I have
been looking for someone else your age who has just bought a radio but
I cannot find anyone. Your planet does not like seem to like
radios or light very much. I have surmised (from meeting some
other people of your species) that you do not even SEE any light.
THAT is most DOUBLY silly. Light is Beautiful because it comes in
many colors and makes everything Bright and Visible and Textured!
Plus which there is a sun right near by that you can look at. It
is true I guess that you have a riDiculously thick atmosphere that does
block out much of the light, but STILL! You should definitely
think about talking with sound and seeing light. ANYway, I did
want to ask you for a favor. My name is Jemmiut and I am friends
with some people who do want to underStand you. You and all the
other Carapacians (that is what we call you). We did meet some of
you (as I have said) and that did not go so well. Basically what
happened is we offered them our hospitality and they all killed
themselves. I do not understand quite why that is. I hope
that you can come and help me and all of us understand, and Please do
not kill yourself, or at least not until you have exPlained to us what
we would like to Know. Have you met the Humans? They live
not too far away and I have inVited one Over. I think that we can
maybe All have a little chat and maybe also a little adVenture to get
to know each other and then we can work out just why you are SO
INCREDIBLY SILLLLLYYY!! Oh and I should mention that in exchange
for your time in adDition to our hospiTality we will also Give you
stuff. I do not know what we can give you but there is a lot of
stuff lying around that you can basically take whatever you like.
If you are interested then you should please go to that flat part of
the rocky field a little ways north from here and take along your radio
and turn it on sometime around two-five-oh toMorrow after you get this
Message. You should pack anything you will need. I look
forward to meeting you, even if you Are a sillyhead. Goodbye now
and I hope you are having a good dream!! Goodnight.”
Chapter 4
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