Triton (Trouble on Triton) (48 page)

Slade was not invited to give the next year’s lectures; it is said he expressed great relief about this to some of his colleagues with whom he was in correspondence, as well as to his seminar students. The reports, however, of Slade’s work in the Modular Calculus (growing out of his early work in metalogics) had percolated down from the devotees of BPR-57-c, making it inevitable that he be asked again; once more the invitation was extended. Slade consented. This time he discussed the outline of the three lectures he wished to present with the Harbin-Y trustees in a way that lead them to believe the talks would at least approach the comprehensible. A holographic simulation was arranged in the auditorium. The lecture titles were announced:

Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus:

1) Shadows

2) Objectives

3) Illuminations

The three lectures were scheduled for the usual evening times. The usual invitations were sent. Thanks to five years confusion, there was a good deal more than the usual curiosity. Many people—far more than might be expected for such an abstruse affair—turned to Slade’s early work, the serious in preparation, the curious for hints of what was to come.

A perusal of any dozen pages from the
Summa
reveals Slade’s formal philosophical presentation falls into three, widely differing modes. There are the closely reasoned and crystallinely lucid arguments. There are the mathematical sections in which symbols predominate over words; and what words there are, are fairly restricted to: “... therefore we can see that ...”

“... we can take this to stand for ...”

“... from following these injunctions it is evident that ...” and the like. The third mode comprises those sections of richly condensed (if not inpenetrable) metaphor, in language more reminiscent of the religious mystic than the philosopher of logic. For even the informed student, it is debatable which of these last modes, mathematical or metaphorical, is the more daunting.

One of the precepts of Slade’s philosophy, for example, explicit in his early work and implicit in his later, is a belief in the absolute distinction between the expression of “process/relation/operation” on the one hand and the expression of “matter/material/substance” on the other for rational clarity, as established by the contemporary episteme; as well as a belief in their absolute and indeseverable interface, in the real Universe. About this, Slade has remarked: “... This interface will remain indeseverable as long as time is irreversible. Indeed, we can only model the elements on either side separably with those tools—memory, thought, language, art—by which we can also construct models of reversible time.”[1] As one of Slade’s commentators has remarked, in an issue of the
Journal of
Speculative Studies:
“Put this way, it is either understood or it isn’t. Explication here is, really, beside the point.”

The confusion attendant on Slade’s previous invitations to lecture was a vivid memory for many of that year’s audience. The people who assembled
in
the K-Harbin Auditorium that evening came with curiosity, trepidation, and—many of them—excitement.

The auditorium doors were closed.

At the expected time, Slade (with his desk and his blackboard) materialized on stage—dark, small-boned, broad-hipped—in a slightly quavery holographic simulation. The audience quieted. Slade began—there was some difficulty with the sound. After a few adjustments by the student engineer, Slade good-naturedly repeated those opening sentences lost on a loose connection.

An hour and twenty minutes into Slade’s presentation, the first gravity cut hit Lux’s unlicensed sector. Two minutes after that, there was total gravity loss. The city was stripped of atmosphere. And (among five million others) Ashima Slade, still in holographic simulation on the K-Harbin Auditorium stage, was dead.

III

Ashima Slade was born in Mars’s Bellona in 2051. Little is known of his childhood; part was apparently passed in Phoenix Keep, a suburb just outside the city, and part in the notorious Goebels (which some have compared to the unlicensed sectors of the major satellite cities; the comparison must suffice for those who have never been to Bellona, but it has been argued elsewhere, lengthily, and on both sides). At seventeen Slade emigrated to the satellites, arriving, in a shipload of twenty-five hundred, at Callisto Port. Two months after his arrival, he became a woman, moved again to Lux and for six months worked in one of the city’s light-metal refineries: it was here she first met Blondel Audion, when the famous poet descended, among some dozen others, for a flyting, or ritual exchange of poetic insults, in the refinery cafeteria. At six months’ end

(four days after the flyting’s) Slade entered Lux University. Two and a half years later, she published the first volume of her
Summa Metalogiae,
which brought her, academically, both prestige and notoriety; and which led, over the next few years (when the second volume of the
Summa
appeared), to the development of metalogical program analysis, giving Slade a permanent, top-slot credit rating. Slade’s reaction to the commercial success of what had begun as purely abstract consideration was sometimes humorous and, sometimes, bitter. Undoubtedly this practical success prejudiced many of her colleagues in those early years—and in several directions. Some took it as a vindication of pure scholarship. Others took it as an unfortunate sullying of the same. Still others saw it as evidence that Slade’s own work was, at most, clever, rather than fundamentally profound. Slade herself once said (in a seminar, after a morning spent reviewing some of the commercial work done in metalogical analysis that had been sent her to review): “The saddest thing to me is that, though we
are
working under the same principles and parameters, I find what they are doing with them trivial, while they would find what I am doing with them incomprehensible, or meaningless if they
could
comprehend it.”

At about the time of the publication of the second volume of the
Summa,
Slade first became closely associated with the Circle (as it has come to be commonly known since the various studies in the first decade of this century), a collection of extremely talented artists and scientists, some of whom were also connected with the University, some of whom not, but all of whom lived and worked (sometimes together, sometimes in opposition) in Lux. Over twenty-odd years, it included George Otuola, whose twenty-nine-hour opera cycle
Eridani
is still, twelve years after its initial production, considered one of the greatest influences on contemporary art; it included the mathemeticians Lift Zolenus and Saleema Slade (no relation), the poets Ron Barbara, Corinda, Blondel Audion, and Foyedor Huang-Ding, as well as the venerable actress Alona Liang and her then-protege: Gene Trimbell, better known in the world of the theater today as the Spike, who at age twenty-two, directed that first, legendary production of
Eridani.

Some commentators have expended great energy and ingenuity to show that all the work of these, and several other artists and (particularly) biologists, associated over the years with the Circle, revolved around the parameters of Slade’s philosophy—so that Slade might be considered the Circle’s center. If none has completely succeeded, one hindrance to their proof is the complexity of Slade’s work. Also, Slade’s thought for this time is only available through her students’ report. The only thing Slade herself published in these years was her translation, from the twentieth-century American “... into this Magyar-Cantonese dialect, with its foggy distinctions between the genitive and the associative, personally or politically enforced, which serves us for language in the Satellites, on Mars, as well as over eighty percent of Earth ...” (translator’s introduction) of Susanne K. Langer’s
Mind.
Her students through this period were allowed to make notes and were encouraged to “... construct alternate models from these ideas as widely deviant as possible.’* But her talks could not be recorded, as Slade considered her BPR-57-c sessions then “... merely sketches, full of inaccuracies ...” which makes assessment of her actual ideas rather difficult—until the corpus of notes, rescued from that small, back, basement room two weeks after the war, is made available.

Other commentators, less successfully, have tried to show that all the work of the principle Circle members, including Slade’s, hinges on the mystic precepts of the Sygn. As anyone knows who has read in the Circle’s history, that history is intimately connected with the Sygn’s: Barbara and Otuola were both members of the sect during their adolescence, only to break with it (in Barbara’s case peacefully, in Otuola’s rather violently) in their twenties. Barbara’s first book,
Relearning the Language,
deals fairly directly with his religious struggles during his speechless youth. And the Sect of Silent Singers, who figure so prominently in the action of
EridanVs
fifth, seventh, and seventeenth acts, is a fairly direct, if unflattering, portrayal. Slade’s final residence at the Sygn co-operative is only another example, among the myriads possible to cite. The difficulty of proof here, however, is the difficulty in learning more than superficial fragments of the Sygn dogma. Those who emerged from the sect, even those highly critical such as Otuola, were fairly respectful of its mysteries: the sect renounces speech, writing, all publicity, and sex. This makes ascertaining its fundamental tenets during these years only slightly more difficult than ascertaining the letter of Slade’s philosophy.

The most probable verdict is, probably, the most conservative: a great deal of personal, social, and spiritual interplay occurred between members of the Circle and members (and exmembers) of the Sygn. But it is what these men and women brought to it, rather than what they took from it, that ultimately makes the Circle the fascinating moment in the intellectual life of the Satellite Federation that it is. Slade was fifty-four.
Summa Metalogiae
was two dozen years in the past. The triumphant opening of
Eridard
(which to many represents the peak of Circle creativity) was two years by. Only three months before, Corinda’s eighth collection of poems,
Printed Circuits,
had occasioned her receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature, making her not only the youngest person so awarded (she was then thirty-six), but also the first person born on a moon to be so honored by Earth’s Swedish Academy. (Many felt, with justification, that the award was really being given, in retrospect, for her magnificent
Eridani
libretto, written four years before. Even so, many took the award as a beacon whose light might hopefully banish some of the shadows which, day by day, were darkening relations between Earth and the Satellite Federation.) In the thirteenth paramonth of the second year , Ashima Slade, Gene Trimbell (then g

twenty-four), Ron Barbara (twenty-nine), with two men who had recently broken with the Sygn, Sven Holdanks (nineteen) and Pedar Haaviko (fifty-eight), decided to form a family commune. Otuola was, apparently, invited to join. For various reasons, however, she refused.

The commune lasted three months.

Exactly what happened during that time is not known and probably never will be—unless it is on record in some Government Information Retention Bank, available only to the participants. Its obviously painful character, however, is probably one reason biographies of all the survivors are not in General Information and are “withheld on request.” Because some of the members are still alive, speculation must be fairly circumspect.

At the end of the three months, at ten o’clock at night, the building near the center of the Lux u-1, housing the commune’s sixteen rooms, went up in flames, gutted by a furious chemical fire. Holdanks, the commune’s youngest member, had committed suicide the same afternoon in a music practice room on the University campus, hanging himself with piano wire. A day later, Ms Trimbell was admitted to a rest clinic for extreme distress (hallucinations, exhaustion, and hysteria) where she remained several months. Ron Barbara simply disappeared: his whereabouts only became known three years ago when, in quick succession, five slim volumes of poems
{Syntax I, Syntax II, Rime, Themos,
and
Syntax III)
appeared from a small, experimental publishing house in Bellona, where he has apparently been living for some while, having emigrated there after wandering for nearly a decade about the ice of four moons. The poems are abstruse, nearly incomprehensible, contain more mathematical symbols than words, and are in vast discord with his earlier, extremely lucid, direct and, essentially, verbal style that brought both popularity and critical approbation to such Barbara works as
Katalysis
and
Ice/Flows.
The new poems are the more frustrating because they contain (so people associated with the Circle have claimed) many references to the events of those three months. On the day of the commune’s breakup, Haaviko rejoined the Sygn and sank into its secret and silent rituals.

On the morning after the holocaust, Slade was found, unconscious, in an alley two units from the house, blinded, severely lacerated, and otherwise maimed—most of the injuries, apparently, self-inflicted. Sometime during the three-month interim, she had again become a man.

Slade was taken to a clinic, from which he emerged two months later, frail, blind, white-haired, prematurely aged, a round, two-inch silver photoplate set off-center above his scarred eye-sockets, which he now used to “see” with. (The photoplate was set off-center because Slade did not want to block his “third eye”, or pineal gland, an eccentricity easily complied with by the visual clinicians—another thing that has led some critics to suspect Slade’s connection with the Sygn to be greater than it was: the Sygn set heavy store by this traditional site of cosmic awareness. Slade himself, however, once said this decision was more in the nature of “Pascal’s wager,” which, on another occasion, when discussing Pascal [and not himself at all] he referred to as “... the archetype of moral irresponsibility to the self.” Whatever occurred in those three months, we can only assume that it shook Slade on every level a human being can be shaken. Slade left the clinic presumably cured, but many of his friends, who would occasionally meet him, walking barefoot, in his shabby, gray cloak, through the alleys of the Lux u-1, avoiding the main thoroughfares because they made him uncomfortable, felt he was not entirely responsible, especially during these first weeks.