The Speculist

Chapter 38

Part IV

Chapter Thirty-Eight

 

(Read earlier chapters.)

 

Reuben Stone was once again seated across from me at my desk. From the top drawer I produced the transaction record, which I had received by fax earlier that day. I set it on the table in front of him.

“Why,” I asked him, “can you not follow simple instructions?”

He picked up the bank statement, briefly looked it over, and then set it back down.

“I’m sorry Miss Wong, but this is the best I could do.”

“It’s not nearly good enough. This isn’t even half.”

“That’s true,” he said, setting his briefcase on my desk. He fiddled with a mechanism on the front for a moment and then opened it. As the lid was swinging open, I had a momentary image of neat little bundles of cash such as you see in the movies, but that was not the reality. The case contained a stack of odd-looking documents. They might have been title deeds to parcels of swampland or diplomas from some disreputable school.

I thumbed through them for a moment.

“What exactly are these things?”

“They’re bearer bonds, Miss Wong. Every bit as good as cash, and much easier to carry around.”

“I don’t see how anything could be “every bit as good” as cash. Furthermore, I didn’t ask for cash. I asked for a wire transfer. It’s a simple procedure. I’m baffled as to why you would have so much trouble with it. Did Mr. Keyes have a bad day at the race track?”

Reuben closed the case and put it back down on the floor. These “bearer bonds” were apparently mine to keep.

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t keep up with his finances. He assisted me in the delivery of these funds, but this is not his money.”

I raised an eyebrow at him.

“Then who?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Not you, Reuben.”

He thought about this.

“Well, not…exactly me.”

“Ah, I see. Your former self. Reuben, do you realize that you may be the first man in history ever to rob his own grave?”

He smiled at that, a little.

“I prefer to think of it as an inter-context loan. In any event, the same funds are available back on the world I left behind for any other hapless Reuben who comes along needing help.”

“That doesn’t seem likely.”

“Neither was my coming here.”

I set the documents down on the desk.

“Well, this is all very interesting. And I suppose you are to be commended for wanting to make your own way in this world rather than running back to Daddy —”

“He’s not my father.”

“Merely a figure of speech. And you will refrain from interrupting me again. Now, what was I saying? Ah, yes. It is in some sense commendable that you prefer making your own way in the world. Even if it isn’t exactly your own way. But close enough.”

I picked the bonds back up and waved them at him.

“These, however, are not close enough. I gave very specific instructions, and this is not what I asked for.”

“I apologize for the that, Miss Wong. If you’ll count them, you’ll see that the bonds total $650,000. When you add that to the $400,000 I had wired to your account, you come out $50,000 ahead. I thought it only right that I throw a little something in to make up for the inconvenience.”

I leafed through the bonds, counting them carefully. He was telling the truth. How could I tell him that I had been prepared to settle for the $400,000 — after subjecting him to the appropriate level of harassment, of course. I thought he was driving a hard bargain, and I was prepared to go along. I would have made him squirm a little first, but only for a while. It only goes to show how poorly cut out I am for this sort of thing.

Silly me, I would have been pleased with the just the wire transfer, delighted with it plus enough in cash — or rather, bonds — to make up the difference. And then Mr. Wonderful comes along with the full million plus a gratuity?

It was almost enough to make me feel guilty.

Almost.

“Very well, then. The first lesson can commence.”

I placed the bonds in my desk drawer. Reuben eyed me carefully as I did it.

“You’ll probably want to put those someplace more safe.”

“That’s my concern. I take it that you’ve finished reading the book?”

“To tell you the truth, I got about three-quarters of the way through it before I fell asleep. I’ve been awfully tired lately.”

I nodded.

“That’s not unusual. Disrupting the waveform is hard work, particularly for those who haven’t been properly trained. That is no excuse for not completing your assignment, however.”

“Sorry, Miss Wong.”

“Don’t let it happen again.”

“I won’t.”

“So, what questions do you have on the first three quarters of the book?”

Reuben looked at the desk and rubbed that spot on his head for a moment.

“I’m not even sure I know how to formulate the questions. I understood very little of what I read. He keeps talking about the Spiral. And the fundament. And that whole business about playing that game. Mancala. I’m sorry, I just wasn’t following any of it.”

“Well, let’s start with some basics. It will probably not come as good news to you that we have, over the years, replaced many of Jaloor’s terms — or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say Altheus’s terms, since he was translating concepts from Jaloor’s language to Latin — with more up-to-date nomenclature. The Spiral is now called the Waveform. The fundament we now call the Configuration Space. The bit about the game requires a somewhat lengthy explanation. And a demonstration. But first tell me what you understood.”

Reuben sighed.

“Okay. He started out talking about the…seeds?”

“That’s correct. The game can be played with seeds. It can also be played with stones or seashells, or just about anything that’s small and abundant. It could also be played with coins, but — this is very important, Reuben — in the Society, we never play games with coins. That’s something you’ll want to keep in mind. If you want to be one of us, there will be no games with coins. No penny-pitching. No slot machines. Nothing.”

Reuben looked truly perplexed, as well he might be. There was no particular reason for me to take this digression into an obscure area of society law. But I have a gift for digression. I consider it a talent.

“Why not?” he asked after a moment.

“Because there are those who play games with coins, and we are not them.”

The look of understanding and recognition that came over him was so pronounced that it would have been comical, were it not obvious that this revelation was associated with some painful memory.

“You think you have some idea what it is that I’m talking about, Reuben?”

He nodded.

“Yes. I’ve met them. The people who play games with coins. I met one in Soviet Georgia. And maybe another one before that, in Russia. Who are they?”

He reconsidered his question as soon as he asked it.

“What are they?”

That Reuben would make such a distinction indicated that he might, in fact, have had some experience with the Shedders. But I didn’t see how that was possible. He was here, after all.

And alive.

“We’ll talk about them later. We should continue with the lesson. What, exactly, did Jaloor say about the seeds?”

Reuben wouldn’t give up.

“Miss Wong, I think I should tell you something. There was a part of my story that I left out the other day. And it might be important. Before I went to Italy, I was in — ”

I slapped the table with the palm of my hand. Not too forcefully; just loud enough to get his attention and shut him up. I’ve always believed that a gift for digression is well accompanied by an irrational insistence on getting back to the subject at hand.

“I said that we would talk about it later. Now what does Jaloor say about the seeds?”

Reuben let out a sigh of exasperation. He then looked down for a moment, trying to remember what he had read.

“He said that it was more important to consider them, at first, than it was the bowls that contained them. He said something to like this…you can lay out a line of seeds or you can make a shape out of them. Or you can lay out a whole bunch of seeds and it will contain lots of different lines and shapes.”

I nodded.

“You’re on the right track. Let me show you.”

I wheeled my chair back a bit, and reached under my desk to pick up the game. It was beautifully carved from wood in the shape of an ornate, two-headed dragon. Two rows of rounded depressions, each a perfect little bowl, ran down the dragon’s back. Each row had seven bowls, and each bowl contained seven smooth and perfectly polished stones. I set the game on the desktop and took hold of several small stones.

Reuben looked intrigued.

“So this is the game? Mancala?”

I nodded.

“In this country, we call it congkak. This particular game is from Indonesia, where they call it congklak, with an L. It was a gift from Ix. Mr. Ahmad, I mean. He always insists that the Indonesian version of the game is superior to the Malaysian, although I was never able to ascertain any difference. But, in any event, it is the same as the Arab game that Al Razi’s followers played.”

“But Jaloor wasn’t one of Al Razi’s followers. Altheus was. How did Jaloor know anything about Mancala?”

Once in a while, Reuben would say something truly intelligent. Such moments put me in the precarious position of having to reevaluate his status as a know-nothing alpha male Yank git. And I was already a bit softened towards him in light of his Boy-Scout-like performance in delivering the entire requested amount.

Fortunately, such moments were rare. And they tended to pass quickly.

“That is a puzzle, isn’t it? Apparently, Jaloor’s world had a game sufficiently similar to Mancala that Altheus was able to make the leap. Perhaps it’s not as big a coincidence as it seems. It’s only to be expected, after all, that alchemist types from different contexts would share certain interests. In any case, no one has ever come up with a more satisfying translation than Mancala.”

“You mean to say that there are still some people who can read the book in Jaloor’s language?”

“Yes. The language has been lost and rediscovered several times through the years. As long as we have a copy of the original and Altheus’s Latin translation, we have a way back to Jaloor’s language. But we are digressing once again. Here is what the book says. If you have some seeds — or stones — you can lay them out in a vertical line if you wish, like this.”

I lined up three stones in front of him on the desk.

“Or you can make a horizontal line, like this.”

I picked up the same three stones and rearranged them perpendicular to their original configuration.

“With me so far?”

Reuben nodded.

I picked up a few more of the stones.

“Or if you wish, you can set the stones in more elaborate patterns. We can make a triangle…”

I lined the stones into triangular pattern.

“…or a circle…”

I straightened out the side of the circle

“…or a square. These are all good arrangements of the stones. We might call them valid configurations of the stones.”

“Okay, I can see that much.”

I grabbed several handfuls of stones from the game trays and set them out on the table.

“But what if we want to create not just one or two possible configurations of the stones, but all of the possible configurations?”

“Well, you’d need a lot more of them.”

“Precisely.”

I arranged the stones into five rows of six.

“Now, Reuben. Find a straight line.”

He traced his finger along one of the rows of stones.

“And a line perpendicular to that?”

He traced one of the columns.

“Now show me a triangle.”

Reuben traced a triangle with his finger.

“And a square? And a circle?”

He easily found both shapes embedded within the grid of stones.

“So I ask you this, Reuben: is there a circle in the stones?”

He nodded.

“I just showed you.”

“Yes. It was there when you showed it to me. Is it there now?”

Reuben took a moment to consider this.

“If I read the book correctly, then the answer is that the circle exists, but it doesn’t have…occasion.”

I tried not to sigh impatiently and roll my eyes. Perhaps not as hard as I could have, but I did try.

“Occurrence, Reuben. Not occasion. Occurrence.”

“Right,” he said, reaching out and moving one of the stones in closer to the others. “It doesn’t have occurrence.”

“And did it have occurrence before?”

“Yes.”

“When did it have occurrence?”

“When I was…drawing it with my finger.”

I nodded.

“You seem to understand what you read fairly well. What else did Jaloor say?”

“He said that, if you wanted to, you could find letters in the seeds. He talked about tracing the name MILANO. I suppose we could do the same thing with the name of any place.”

Once again he poised his finger over the stones.

“Here’s M,” he said, tracing the letter. “And now A. And L. A again. C. Then another C. And A once more. MALACCA. So it looks like your town is in there, too.”

I nodded.

“That reminds me. Are you still in that hotel in KL?”

He seemed startled by the question.

“Ah, no. I checked out this morning. It was going to take too much time, driving down here and back every day.”

“And do you have a place to stay down here?”

“Not yet.”

“I see. All right, then. Go on, Reuben.”

He shook his head, trying to get back on the subject.

“Then he talked about time. He said that time is like finding a poem, a sonnet, in the seeds. If I were to spell out the words Shall I compare to thee to a summer’s day, each of the words would have occurrence while I was spelling it out. And the length of the poem — it’s duration in time — would also have occurrence.”

“So does time exist?”

Reuben closed his eyes, trying to remember what he had read.

“No. Yes. Well, sometimes it has occurrence, so it must have existence. Right?

“It would seem that way. Or perhaps its occurrence is an optical illusion. In any case, unlike the shapes and the letters that make up the sonnet, if time exists it does so only when it has occurrence.”

“So you don’t know whether time exists?”

I shook my head.

“Not really. But I think it’s easier to assume that it does, since trying to think about the alternatives gives one rather a headache.”

He sighed.

“I get those a lot. Anyway, this is where the book gets kind of tricky. Jaloor says that if I hold two fingers over the seeds and trace out the sonnet, there will really be two sonnets. And if I have enough seeds and I run my whole hand over them — pointed down like this, I guess — there will be five sonnets.”

“And if your hand had a thousand fingers?”

“I’d be some kind of incredible freak. But if I had enough seeds, I could trace out a thousand sonnets.”

“And they would all be identical?”

“No. Each would be slightly different because of the different shapes and angles of my fingers. And the placement of the seeds.”

“Do you understand now, Reuben?”

He cleared his throat.

“I guess the waveform has a lot of fingers. And somehow I’ve jumped from a poem being spelled out by one finger to a poem being spelled out by another.”

I began gathering up the stones and putting them back in their bowls.

“So you do understand, after all.”

“But one thing I don’t get. What are the seeds? The stones, I mean.”

He watched me for a moment as I finished with the stones and put the game back under the table.

“Don’t you have any idea?”

He nodded.

“Maybe. Somehow I got this idea that everything is made of memories. Is that what the stones are…collections of memories?”

Once again, Reuben surprised me by understanding things that I wouldn’t have credited him with being able to grasp.

“Yes, Reuben. The configuration space is filled with collections of memories. The waveform passes through those memories, giving them occurrence. The order in which it moves from memory to memory is what we call time.”

We were both silent for a moment.

“And yes. The waveform has many, many fingers.”

Reuben rubbed his head for a while. He seemed disinclined to ask the questions he needed to ask next.

“How can they be memories?” he said at last. “Who is remembering them? God?”

I shrugged.

“Perhaps they’re only memories after the fact. It’s possible that everything we call existence is simply the process of potential memories becoming actual memories.”

“Okay. Fine. How are they collected, Miss Wong? I mean…how much is in each collection of memories?”

“I think you sense the answer to your own question, Reuben. Let me just tell you that motion, like time, is an illusion generated by the pattern drawn out by the waveform.”

“So each one of those rocks on the table was a snapshot? A freeze-frame?”

I nodded.

“And time is like some animated film where we move from one frame to the next?”

“That’s correct.”

There was another long pause before Reuben asked his final question. By the time it came out, it was no longer a question at all.

“ You’re saying that each one of these stones is a freeze-frame of an entire universe.”

I nodded again.

“If you’re going to be one of us, Reuben, you need to learn the correct terminology. Each of the stones is an instance of the universe. Each instance of the universe is complete and unchanging.”

“And the waveform…”

“It touches an instance of the universe. One after the other. For the briefest of moments, the waveform gives the collection of memories occurrence. And then it returns that instance of the universe to its former state.”

“It’s former state?” he repeated.

“Stillness, Reuben. It returns it to the Stillness.”

Posted by Phil at February 29, 2004 11:59 AM | TrackBack