Stone says. He tries to summon up the thanks he meant to give, but can’t find them anywhere, so disconcerted is he. Instead, he says tentatively, “My job—”
“Naturally you’re curious,” Citrine says. “It must be something underhanded or loathsome or deadly. Why else would I need to recruit someone from the Bungle? Well, let me at last satisfy you. Your job, Mr. Stone, is to study.”
Stone is dumbfounded. “Study?”
“Yes, study. You know the meaning of the word, don’t you? Or have I made a mistake? Study, learn, investigate, and whenever you feel you understand something, draft me a report.”
Stone’s bafflement had passed through amazement to incredulity. “I can’t even read or write,” he says. “And what the frack am I supposed to study?”
“Your field of study, Mr. Stone, is this contemporary world of ours. I have had a large part, as you may know, in making this world what it is today. And as I reach the limits of my life, I grow more interested in whether what I have built is bad or good. I have plenty of reports from experts, both positive and negative. But what I want now is a fresh view from one of the underdwellers. All I ask is honesty and accuracy.
“As for reading and writing—those outmoded skills of my youth—June will assist you in learning those if you wish. But you have machines to read to you and transcribe your speech. You may start at once.”
Stone tries to assimilate this mad request. It seems capricious, a cover for deeper, darker deeds. But what can he do except say yes?
He agrees.
A tiny smile plucks at the woman’s lips. “Fine. Then our talk is over. Ch. one last thing. If you need to conduct on-site research, June must accompany you. And you will mention my sponsorship of you to no one. I don’t want sycophants.”
The conditions are easy—especially having June always close—and Stone nods his acceptance.
Citrine turns her back to them then. Stone is startled by what he sees, almost believing his eyes defective.
Perched on the broad back of her chair is a small animal resembling a lemur or tarsier. Its big, luminous eyes gaze soulfully at them, its long tail arcs in a spiral above its back.
“Her pet,” whispers June, and hurries Stone away.
* * * *
The task is too huge, too complex. Stone considers himself a fool for ever having accepted.
But what else could he have done, if he wanted to keep his eyes?
Stone’s cramped and circumscribed life in the Bungle has not prepared him well to fathom the multiplex, extravagant, pulsating world he has been transported to. (At least this is what he initially feels.) Literally and figuratively kept in the dark for so long, he finds the world outside the Citrine Tower a mystifying place.
There are hundreds, thousands of things he has never heard of before. People, cities, objects, events. There are areas of expertise whose names he can hardly pronounce. Areology, chaoticism, fractal modeling, paraneurology. And don’t forget history, that bottomless well atop which the present moment is but a scrim of bubbles. Stone is, perhaps, most shocked by his discovery of history. He cannot recall ever having considered life as extending backward in time beyond his birth. The revelation of decades, centuries. millennia nearly pushes him into a mental abyss. How can one hope to comprehend the present without knowing all that has gone before?
Hopeless, insane, suicidal to persist.
Yet Stone persists.
He closets himself with his magic window on the world, a terminal that interfaces with the central computer in the Citrine Tower—itself a vast, unintelligible hive of activity—and through that machine to almost every other in the world. For hours on end, images and words flash by him, like knives thrown by a circus performer—knives that he, the loyal but dumb assistant, must catch to survive.
Stone’s memory is excellent, trained in a cruel school, and he assimilates much. But each path he follows has a branch every few steps, and each branch splits at frequent points, and those tertiary branches also sprout new ones, no less rich than the primaries....
Once Stone nearly drowned, when a gang left him unconscious in a gutter and it began to rain. He recalls the sensation now.
June brings him three meals faithfully each day. Her presence still thrills him. Each night, as he lies abed, he replays stored images of her to lull him asleep. June bending, sitting, laughing, her Asian eyes aglow. The subtle curves of her breasts and hips. But the knowledge-fever is stronger, and he tends to ignore her as the days go by.
One afternoon Stone notices a pill on his lunch tray. He asks June its nature.
“Its a mnemotropin—promotes the encoding of long-term memories,” she replies. “I thought it might help you.”
Stone swallows it greedily, and returns to the droning screen.
Each day he finds a pill at lunch. His brain seems to expand to a larger volume soon after he takes them. The effect is potent, allowing him to imagine he can ingest the world. But still, each night when he finally forces himself to stop, he feels he has not done enough.
Weeks pass. He has not prepared a single sentence for Alice Citrine. What does he understand? Nothing. How can he pass judgment on the world? It’s hubris, folly. How long will she wait before she kicks his ass out onto the cold street?
Stone drops his head in his hands. The mocking machine before him torments him with a steady diarrhea of useless facts.
A hand falls lightly on his quivering shoulder. Stone imbibes June’s sweet scent.
Stone smashes the terminal’s power stud with the base of his palm so fiercely it hurts. Blessed silenee. He looks up at June.
“I’m no damn good at this. Why’d she pick me? I don’t even know where to start.”
June sits on a cushion beside him. “Stone, I haven’t said anything, because I was ordered not to direct you. But I don’t think sharing a little of my experience will count as interference. You’ve got to limit your topic, Stone. The world’s too big. Alice doesn’t expect you to comprehend it all, distill it into a masterpiece of concision and sense.
“The world doesn’t lend itself to such summations, anyway. I think you unconsciously know what she wants. She gave you a clue when you talked to her.”
Stone summons up that day, plays back a view he filed of the stern old woman. Her features occult June’s. The visual cue drags along a phrase.
“—whether what I have built is bad or good.”
It is as if Stone’s eyes have overloaded. Insight floods him with relief. Of course, the vain and powerful woman sees her life as the dominant theme of the modern era, a radiant thread passing through time, with critical nodes of action strung on it like beads. How much easier to understand a single human life than that of the whole world. (Or so he believes at the moment.) That much he thinks he can do. Chart Citrine’s personal history, the ramifications of her long career, the ripples spreading from her throne. Who knows? It might indeed prove archetypal.
Stone
