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3rd November, 1957. Baikonur, Kazakstan. A HANDFUL OF PIXELS IN WHICH EGO BATTLES SUPEREGO GRUNDRISSE 3rd November, 1957. Baikonur, Kazakstan. On the day of Joel's birth (and the day of President Truman's announcement) Soviet troops rolled into a stretch of countryside which lies to the north of the town of Leninsk, which sits on the banks of the Syr Dar'ya river, which runs from the Kazakstan plain into the lowlands of the Caspian Depression. They were there to break up any settlements in the area and relocate their stone-skinned occupants either to the collective farms in the north or, if any of them choose to argue, to oblivion. Some time later huge earth movers arrived by rail, constructivist visions realised in poor quality steel, and began to level a vast tract of land which over the next few years would slowly, as concrete scabbed its way across the countryside, become the Baikonur Kosmodrome. From here, on 4th October, 1957, carried by an R7 ICBM test vehicle, the first man-made satellite would be launched into space. Laika was born and bred at Baikonur. Not much of a home for a dog, she shared it with sixteen other pups of various breeds, some thoroughbred, some indeterminate. They lived in a compound behind the MIK Assembly Building in a collection of concrete kennels on stilts and their programme was supervised by one Pavel Renko. Renko was a jack of all trades, part rocket technician, part veterinarian, part dialectician, a veteran of the intellectual migrations set in motion throughout Stalin's United Soviet. It was a biography which had embittered. Originally from Murmansk, he resented his transfer to Baikonur on the grounds of the weather, convincing himself that he missed the endless Arctic winters and the sheer desolation of the Kola Peninsula. In his training of the dogs he was somewhat over-enthusiastic, killing three and crippling two of those in his charge. But he got results and they were only dogs, so what did it matter? The important thing was that one of them should be ready for the launch. They needed to find out if it was possible to survive. They had started work on Vostok I and were already training Gagarin. They chose Laika because of her name. Laika means "barker" in Russia. She had yelped almost as soon as she'd slid out the womb, still hot from her mother and fragrant like freshly baked bread, and she'd expressed herself that way ever since. Renko's assistants, Alexei and Mickl, took a shine to her because of it; they had to exercise the dogs every day and the way Laika sat and cocked her head and woofed in response to anything they asked her made her seem that bit more intelligent, that little bit more human. And so they sent her into space, because she was more human, because it was an honour, because she'd be on postage stamps and she'd have streets and rock bands named after her. As if any of that mattered to Laika. After all, she was only going to get seven days up there and then they'd pull the plug. They trained her up, it took months, they trained others too, but they always knew it would be her. They got her used to the harness, shaved her, got her used to the electrodes, shaved her again. She was cold without her fur so they made her a coat but it rubbed and so they trained her not to tear at it with her teeth. They taught her how to eat and how to shit. And what to do once she'd eaten and shat. They made her drink from a teat on the wall, it wasn't like lapping, certainly not. They taught her other stuff too, secrets, things we can't mention here for fear of the consequences, though the information is out there if you know where to look. It's most definitely out there. It is. She didn't bark too much when, already sealed inside of Sputnik II, they wheeled her out to the rocket. She sat there whimpering nervously, the acceleration harness making it impossible for her to move, her limp tail disturbed only by an occasional half-hearted wag, not sure whether to be excited or afraid. She licked at Mickl's fingers through the glass of the one small porthole and was confused by the sadness she saw in his eyes. And then she was in the air, hoisted aloft by a crane and lowered into position in the nose cone of the R-7. A group of jump-suited technicians had been waiting at the top of the gantry and now they went to work, attaching release bolts to the capsule and running several hours worth of last minute checks. Consoled by this human activity and no longer able to see that she was perched high above the ground Laika calmed down a little, though not enough to doze as she generally liked to do of an afternoon. And then the checks were complete and the nose cone was clipped shut and suddenly it was all dark for the dog. The radio and monitor crackled awake: Renko's face flickered before her and his voice was there too, though some way off to one side. He spoke a series of words into a microphone, not looking into the camera, just reeling them off, words to which she knew how to respond. She gave a bark at each one, as she'd been taught, and waited tensely for the yell or the biscuit, whichever would come. And then the earth cracked apart and she barked and she barked at the figure of Renko, there was nothing else for it, she had to, she had to bark, and louder and louder because she couldn't hear herself, no matter how hard she barked she could hear nothing at all and then she was pushed down, down, a huge thing pushing her down, it had never been like this, she had done what they'd asked, it was never like this. The forces rippled her skin as easily as if it were oil. As she shot into space she thought of her mother, of her smell, a good smell it was. Later, she took up a low orbit at a height of 298 kilometres above sea level and swung round the earth like a star. Back to the top. A HANDFUL OF PIXELS Jennifer lay with her nose about three inches from the dusty screen of Donald's old TV and watched Happy Days, Roadrunner cartoons, The Osmonds, sitcoms, soaps and reruns of Lost in Space the signal of which, it just so happened, was also being picked up by Laika in her satellite. Both dog and girl had a thing about the robot. He looked so useless with his goldfish bowl head and flexi-tube arms, and yet the flashing lights suggested that a keen and even tender intelligence lay within. It was 1972, six years after Doreen had her husband committed and the year that Joel had left Cambridge for CERN, and Jennifer had just turned twelve. Eager to explore all possible watching habits, she had recently begun to hold TV parties on Saturday afternoons, an idea that grew out of the original moon-landing gathering three years before. After lunch about ten children would come over to watch the afternoon matinée, which was as a rule either a Western, a musical or a Hollywood epic of great scope and grandeur. If the weather was fine, Henry would retire to the garden while they watched and potter about. He would mow the lawn, or do a spot of weeding, or just read the paper. What he would never do was stray very far from a regularly refreshed squat crystal tumbler full of gin and tonic mixed half and half which he would bring from the drinks cabinet in the living room, set down on the chipped metal filigree of the garden table and return to at intervals which grew shorter and shorter as the sun sank lower and lower in the sky. Every refill meant confronting the gathered children, and with every refill he would smile a little more and see a little less. By the time evening came, nothing much would exist outside of the three sides of fence that boxed in his plot and the sunset, whose great burning orb would begin to seem to him like a giant lemon sliding into the bottomless cocktail of the night. When it dipped out of sight it was time to go in for a sweater, a top-up, and some dinner for which Jennifer - whose friends, called home by their mothers, would have left by now - would now be clamouring. In the winter he would cook lunch for her instead (chops under the grill and frozen peas and mash) pick at his own portion until she finished eating, greet the children who spewed in through the door all sticky sweets and sweaty hands and screaming for the movie, leave the dishes in the sink and disappear off to the local or perhaps the golf club to play a quick round and hover in the bar for an hour or two before returning. When he got back, Jennifer would no doubt have raided the biscuit tin and be curled up asleep on the armchair by the fire. He thought at the beginning that he enjoyed the children's company, and for the first few of those TV afternoons he sat with them on the pretext of making sure that they got up to no mischief. But the hot mess of rapt faces, wide eyes, lips wet with sucking and chewing and half-clad young limbs opened him to something that the booze had long kept subdued. The soft nap of a pre-pubescent thigh, the bud of a breast pressed up against the arm of a chair, a young boy's erection brought on and sustained by boredom; these things did not fail to come to his notice. He was a man of the world, or so he thought, he had read Lolita (several times), and while he was aware of the dangers he believed they could be contained. So he did not see it as a problem when Judd - whom Henry regarded as an presumptuous boy (and certainly exotic) but whom Jennifer seemed to like - pulled the hair of Alice, the youngest of Jennifer's friends, and Alice started to cry and insisted on sitting on Uncle Henry's knee before she would stop. If Henry's hands did not stray and everything was good and proper it was only for a while, because desire will always disrupt, and before long Henry was silently giving thanks that the girl did not notice - or did not seem to notice - the extra muscle that ran along his thigh and remained there until just before the film was due to end and the parents due to arrive, when he had to place his charge back down on the floor and shuffle upstairs to relieve his aching testicles and rearrange his damp and ruffled clothing. From then on Alice regarded Henry's lap as her domain. Capable of generating the precise amount of emotional upheaval needed to get her own way (even that first time there had been some debate in the group as to whether Judd had pulled her hair unprovoked or whether she had driven him to it) she had also noted with her sure child's eye that the staking of her claim had aroused not the slightest jealousy in Jennifer. Indeed, Alice was slightly disappointed, as this had been part of the desired effect, but she was not to know that Jennifer did not regard her putative father as in any strong way hers. They lived together like earth and moon, bound together by circumstance, ritual, habit, and the gravitational pull of normality, into the pit of which all things eventually slide. But they never really touched. This suited poor Henry, who was more intimate with the shades and moods of his cocktails than those of his daughter, and it suited Jennifer too, who with perfect precociousness knew that if the relationship functioned at all it was because it was she who was responsible for her father and not the other way around. She had been flipped into self-possession at a tender age by the circumstances of her mother's life and the catastrophe of her death, as if, even as an infant, various behavioural modes had lain latent within her, one of which - the one she'd settled into - was able to accommodate the stresses of her childhood. So she was happy that Alice should be dandled from Henry's knee because he would never dandle her, Jennifer, again, and she felt no regret over this. Although she knew something of boys she did not know enough to make a conscious connection between these afternoons and the stiff, sweet stains on Henry's underwear that she sometimes found when it was her turn to do the wash. Yet she got from them a flush and a tingle in her stomach that came from the awareness of having seen something forbidden or, at least, never spoken of, and which promised that the world was a bigger place than she yet knew. And she also knew that at these times she thought of her friend Rever, and of running in the woods behind the houses after school, and of Mr. Kinever, who taught her science, and who was lithe and firm. So for a few weeks Alice sat on Henry's knee, and Henry got up now and again and disappeared upstairs, the amount of bare flesh that he managed to graze with his fingertips directly proportional to the number of times he had to leave the room. After a while, the experience began to seem quite safe and Henry found himself getting a little bit more drunk and a little bit more brazen until one wet Saturday afternoon as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers flickered across the screen his hand reached that little bit too far. Suddenly Emma's giggles became sobs. She didn't climb down from Henry's knee but sat stock still and demanded to be taken home, as if unaware of the origin of the offending sensation. Something was wrong, something was most definitely wrong, her mind was all confusion, something had happened which didn't fit with the way things were, the way things should be. Henry got up and pretended to fuss and Jennifer came over and shushed and cooed until Alice was calmed by the attention. But she still insisted on being taken home and Henry was put in the awkward position of having to call her parents and ask them to come over and pick her up. The group, minus Alice, watched the rest of the film in silence and then trooped off out of the house. Jennifer left with them. In all it had been an unsuccessful afternoon: the crying business aside, except for Alice everyone had been bored by the film and all of them were left listless and in need of something to do. The rain had stopped and so they all went down to the park to smoke cigarettes and scratch their names on the benches. Judd didn't smoke and he didn't really know anybody either and everyone was a little wary of him because there weren't too many black boys about in Stratford at that time. He charged around the sodden lawns, his arms outstretched, making the sound of a propellers under his breath and saturating his expensive leather shoes with moisture, banking and diving in-between the benches, making his own movie up inside his head. It was easier for him to follow the plot this way anyway - when he watched TV, even when he was with all the other kids at Jennifer's - he often blanked out and missed crucial events. Too embarrassed to ask what he'd missed, and often not realising he'd missed anything at all, he kept quiet which, in the eyes of the others, made him more mysterious still. In the park then they left him to play aeroplanes, to take off from a bench, fly around, return to the same bench to take off again. In 1938, the same year that Jennifer's mother had been told by her dance instructor about Wilbur Wright, the billionaire Howard Hughes had taken off from Floyd Bennett airfield in the United States, spent four days flying around the world in a single circular arc, and returned to park his aeroplane in its hangar in the exact same spot in which it had been parked before his departure. If Nadine had been entranced by the image of Wright taking off in his 'plane and flying in a circle to return to the same spot again, then perhaps she would have been charmed by watching Judd, this little Howard Hughes, flying in circles in order to disappear himself from the crowd of onlookers, running in order to stand still, speeding across the Earth in order to experiment with time. Her daughter was certainly intrigued. Jennifer couldn't keep from glancing at Judd between hot puffs on the carrot-ended cigarettes that were circulating, annoyed by the childishness of his game and drawn to it at the same time. Judd, by the way, was thinking about her too: while the other children blurred into the background, he did not want to disappear Jennifer. Not because of who she was - they'd hardly ever exchanged a word - but because the TV afternoons were hers, and the TV afternoons reminded Judd of home he missed so much. If his father represented for Judd the logical power of machines, then Jennifer had come to represent access to the TV land of his childhood California. If he wasn't bothered by not always being able to follow the plots of the films they watched, it was because the plots weren't what he was there for. Left alone back at the house, Henry turned over the Alice incident in his mind, looking for a way to lie to himself. It wasn't clear, he finally decided, that he'd had any intention of interfering with the girl. For blame to be apportioned, there surely had to be intention, there had to be a moment in which he had made the decision to act. But if such a moment had existed he could not remember it. The drink no doubt had something to do with it - he had certainly drunk more than usual. But now he thought about it he'd had a touch of cramp in his arm, yes that was it, and he'd needed to flex it. A man gets stiff with a child on his lap for that long, and she was no feather, yes, he was often surprised how heavy these kids were, they didn't look it, skinny as alley cats some of them. And the whole affair was probably nothing to do with him anyway. It could have been something in the film that had upset her. Or how did he know one of the boys hadn't whispered something malicious to her? The little black boy, no doubt: he'd pulled her pigtails before, after all. For God's sake, it could even have been the weather, the rain beating a little harder on the window than before, a change in air pressure (he'd better check the barometer in the hallway), a conjunction of the planets. Perhaps the house stood on the intersection of ley lines. Whatever the reason he finally came up with, from then on he kept out of the children's way during those cinematic Saturday afternoons. Jennifer didn't mind. Although she worried about her father, she knew she was quite capable of running things without him around. However many kids turned up of a weekend to watch her TV she was always quietly in control, and none of them, even the older ones, had ever taken any liberties with her or her house. And anyway, without Henry around it was easier for her to test her power over the boys that came over: the world of males had fascinated her for a while now, and like a restless sea lapping discontentedly at the shores of some pre-biotic land she wanted to colonise it. Henry's presence had made the environment too arid for her exploring tendrils to make too much progress, but with him out of the way the atmosphere changed and she was at liberty to use words fingers glances like lichens and mosses, hyphae and rhizomes. With these tools she began to inch her way across the skins of these boys and slowly weave a psychic mat of mild exploitation. Back to the top. IN WHICH EGO BATTLES SUPEREGO "Do you miss her?" That was the first question Dr. Schemata asked Judd. By way of reply the boy stared rather blankly at the wall. A Kandinsky hung there, stark and prime. "How often do you think of her?" the analyst continued. "Come on Judd, I'm here to help you. Do I frighten you? If I frighten you, tell me, and we'll see what we can do about it shall we?" Judd kicked his heels on the floor and thought of the swings in the playground on the edge of a town six thousand miles away. Schemata addressed himself to Moses, who was still in the room. "Perhaps you had better leave us, Mr. Axelrod. It might be a better idea if Judd and I spoke man to man from the start." Moses nodded a slightly hesitant approval and allowed the doctor to guide him from his chair and out the door. The doctor's polyester flares swished together as he walked, making a quiet whipping sound. "I know you understand," he said to Judd's father earnestly. The dark man was several inches taller than Schemata and almost twice his bodyweight. "Make yourself comfortable here in the waiting room. Ms. Klixen!" He called for his assistant, one leg stuck straight out into the air behind him to counterbalance his body, the weight of which was supported only by the friction of his right palm against the burgundy leather panelling of the open door. The woman appeared from around the corner. "Ah, Ms. Klixen. See if Mr. Axelrod would like some coffee would you?" The doctor smiled at Moses and vanished back inside his office, easing the door to behind him with an oh so careful whupp. Moses watched as the handle was turned back into position from the inside, rather than simply released. "How would you like your coffee?" Ms. Klixen's voice was loud in his ear. She was very close. He turned to her and found himself gazing into her cleavage, for all his height. Her perfume gripped his nostrils and prevented him from turning away. It was a very fine cleavage, and it was a moment or two before he pulled himself together and managed to come up with an answer. He grinned at her, looked her in the eye. "Black as night and twice as dark," he said. Returning to his desk, Schemata began again. "Okay Judd, it's just you and me now. Just you and me. I want to make it clear that whatever you tell me goes no further than the inside of these four walls. And these walls don't have ears, I can promise you that. No one else will ever know of the conversations that you and I may have. Not your father, not your mother, not anyone. Do you understand that?" Judd managed a nod. He suddenly wished for bangs, for hair that he could tip forward and hide behind. But his tightly curled fuzz stood up on end and all he had to help him dissemble in the face of the cold gaze of this peculiar man were the coffee-coloured pigments of his skin, a defence he would need to call upon again and again as the next few minutes turned into days and as those days turned into months which would in their turn stretch first into seasons and then into years in a way, sitting here now, that he could neither expect nor imagine. Nor could he foresee how the years to come would be ticked off by the minute hand of his visits to Schemata and how his life would be ruled by a temporality quite different to that of the majority of his peers. For the gregarious rhythms of his childhood were about to be stalled, and Judd would be geared up instead into that calculated zone of adult time which charts the globe with a regime founded on clockwork, migrated into quartz. In 1714 the British Government's Board of Longitude did far more for their country's expansionist cause than many a military division: by offering a prize for the construction of a portable chronometer - a prize won by John Harrison of Hull in 1763 - they managed to subsume even the leavening doughs of the day beneath the drifting structures of their empire so that it too could be specified, ordered, digitised, filed. It was this order which Judd had unknowingly transgressed, and it was to this order that he would now be made to conform. "How often do you masturbate?" Schemata asked. Judd had never thought to count. Schemata had him by the balls, so to speak. "Okay, try this one. What do you think of when you masturbate?" Sugar and spice and all things nice. "Of what do you dream?" Of mountains and horses and bees and blood and packs of hot wolves all acid at the edges. Sometimes the moon, sometimes red rooms with dark gables so high that all smoke is lost. Laughs and doors and words in white bubbles. Batman, the Joker, school desks, nakedness at the end of long corridors, doors opening onto rooms of peering folk. Catwoman, punishment. The soft washes of the sea. Into the forest, into the trees. Control. "Ah hah!" Schemata licked his lips and formed his fingers into a temple. "What thoughts do you have regarding your mother?" Judd crying, very upset. "Your mother is an actress, is she not? Quite a famous actress. I have never met her, but we deal with many actresses here, and I believe I have seen several of her films. Do you like her films?" He never thought about it, he didn't know. He thought of his mother, of his last week in England, of whispers strained voices behind closed doors, of odd words and phrases seeping down to him from the adult world, Jennifer's name, his mother crying, his father hissing. How had he sat during those conversations? With one hand always touching at his nostril lip cheek, the other clutched in the warm space between his tightly closed thighs whilst outside the window the heavy Midlands clay rolled away in low hills until it met far off with the thick, low sky, a sky that seemed to shave the chimney pots off the houses, a sky so weak it almost seemed to rely on the upper branches of the trees and the slate grey village steeples for support. Nothing at all like the sky he'd longed for, a sky so high and round that the greatest towers in the world could rise to challenge it and yet never make a mark, so high that even when great basin smogs hovered for days across the city the sky was still there if you scrambled high enough up in the hills to find it, high up through spinneys of Californian pine and cedar, high up past the millionaire lots with their half-finished houses which pinned back the boulevards that crept up the hillsides beneath you, tentacles of tarmac, oily and broad. Back to the top. GRUNDRISSE Joel emerged from both of the Mandelbrot lectures with his muscles in knots, talking like a maniac. Subhash, who throughout the sessions had been surreptitiously dabbing speed from a wrap he kept hidden beneath the table, said he felt the same way. But even in his artificially accelerated state he could not keep up with Joel's diatribe. For two days Joel didn't sleep. After the first lecture he pursued Mandlebrot through the corridors of the Centre, pestering him with his questions, and would have spent the night at his bedside if he could have done. The next day it was all Subhash could do to drag him away into the Common Room and leave the French mathematician in peace, but although he managed that much it was beyond his abilities to calm Joel down once he had got him there. He began to worry that Axel or Gabriel, two friends who often teased him about his friendship with Joel, had spiked Joel's coffee with an hallucinogenic; it was the kind of practical joke that would appeal to them. Indeed, it was the kind of joke he himself had been involved in in the past. "It's astonishing," Joel kept insisting, "don't you realise the implications of what he's saying? God, and to think I was suckered even for a minute by the juvenile Platonism of that idiot Metric." Subhash had never heard him be so forthright before. "Don't you see how it mocks the very notion of dimensionality? Mandelbrot's shown that form is not static and eternal but is an expression of content over time! That a shape of infinite perimeter can exist within a circle of measurable circumference. Mathematics itself becomes a matter of perspective. Everything becomes a matter of perspective." Subhash couldn't follow him. He couldn't see how the conclusions followed from the premise. "Come on," he said, trying to dilute his friend's excitement, "everybody knows that anyway. We don't need mathematics to persuade us of it. Of course, it's exciting that the field is opening up, but . . ." But Joel's energy was not to be earthed. "Einstein is only the starting point," he went on, connecting madly and - as far as Subhash could see - meaninglessly. "And even he tried to confine the ramifications of his theories. This shows that the actual processes infiltrate existence to a degree beyond his most fervent nightmares. It is so ridiculous, it was right in front of me all the time, all those trays and trays of bread coming out of my fathers ovens. In the folding, in the leavening, where volume is created by patterns of bubbles repeated again and again on every scale, making empty space is as important as matter. It's the Julia set, don't you see? Remember, one of the fractal images that Mandelbrot showed us? It was like looking at the creation itself. It was like seeing the precise construction of space! And the self-similarity across scales, it means you can leap from one thing to the other and yet retain the same relationship. It's . . . I don't know, I don't know, there's no metaphysical division." As he spoke he rushed around the room, crouched on chairs, flailed his arms, his body stuttering on the boundary between walking and running. "And of course what's most marvellous of all is that it fits perfectly with the idea that each of the Sefirah contains within itself an infinite reflection of all of the others. There are possibilities here, there are possibilities. If the universe is fractal, infinitely regressive, as quantum mechanics might seem to suggest, then it might help to make sense of the duality between particle and wave, and it might also help us to understand ideas of perfection! Einstein and Mandelbrot, both Jewish, you see?" Subhash tried to field an objection, But wait a minute Joel, you're not making any kind of sense, you're fudging you must see that, and Joel turned on him: "You don't believe me, do you? You don't believe me. Didn't you hear him? I thought you heard him. But you see what a nonsense it makes of metaphysics? If you don't believe me I'll show you," and he headed out of the room at speed. "Joel, Joel, where in hell are you going?" Subhash yelled, and got up to follow him. It was gone midnight and the lab was empty. All the mini-computers were on, running their interminable calculations like so many cattle munching grass. Joel went straight to the nearest machine - it was busy analysing a portion of the data from one of the accelerator experiments that had been run the previous week - and terminated the programme. "What the fuck are you doing," panted Subhash, running into the room. "That's seventy-two hours of processing time you've just flushed away!" "It's not important right now." "You've flipped man, you've lost it completely. I should never have let you go to that lecture, you're not safe to be let loose on anything except that damned space invaders console you spend so much time playing." "Is there a colour printer around here anywhere?" "I have no fucking idea." "Find me a colour printer! Come on, do you want to see this or not?" Subhash sighed. "I think there's a four colour on the third floor." "Can you bring it down here?" "It weighs a ton. And it's probably locked up anyway." "Well find the keys and get a trolley. There must be one around somewhere." It was pointless to argue; Joel was already entering lines of Unix code into the machine. Deciding he might as well humour him, Subhash went off to get the printer. It turned out not to be on the third floor at all but on the fourth, in one of the classrooms. Although he could see it through the glass the door was locked so, wondering again why he was bothering and feeling that the sensible course of action would be to telephone the local asylum, Subhash went off in search of the night porter. He found him quickly enough, watching television in the coffee area on the second floor, and persuaded him to come and unlock the door. Fortunately there was a trolley in the classroom but even so by the time he got the printer back down to the lab Joel had produced several screens worth of code and was more involved than ever. Annoyed that Joel could only muster a single grunt of approval by way of thanks, Subhash trailed off back to the Common Room to get himself a cup of coffee. He ended up going to sleep across a row of chairs, the latest edition of Scientific American lying open across his face. When he awoke it seemed to him that the room was full of light. His first thought was that he had slept for hours, that it was morning. But as his eyes adjusted themselves to his surroundings he saw that rudely papered across the walls, tacked up on the ceiling, strewn across the floor were huge and vivid posters of fractal scenes, shimmering with iridescent colour like slices of giant precious stones. Some of them were full sets, glaring like the giant eyes of fantastic crustaceans, others were zoomed explorations, aerial views of the idyllic reefs and beaches of some fabulous travel destination, glimpses of the tangled boughs and jungle clumps of an undiscovered Rousseau. "Oh God," he murmured, "what has he done?" Rubbing his eyes he got up and went to look for Joel. He wasn't difficult to find. The corridors that led to the computer lab were plastered with further pixellated pictures of sets with names like Newton, Plasma, Sierpinski, Popcorn, Mandelbrot, Spider, Tetrate, Lambda, Julia, Gingerbread, Kamtorus, Manowar, Manzpower. He felt as if he were walking down the fallopian tubes of some monstrous digital womb, from whose coruscated sides silicon life forms might at any moment begin to sprout like robot maggots. When he was near enough to the lab to hear the hum of the printer and the whirr of the fans he felt afraid. It was as if the whole building was alive. Frantic light played in a rectangle on the wall opposite the open lab door, the spilled photons scheming furiously like the molecules in some protoplasmic soup. Peering round the doorframe into the room it looked to Subhash as if the treasure chambers of the world had been rudely melted down and converted into a series of epileptic pools, each of which was the baroque tracing of an obsessed and psychotic mind. Joel had got all of the computers generating fractal sets on their screens and flashing them in black and green, green and black. In addition to the colour printer, which was still chugging out the pictures which already covered every available surface, Joel had found a second machine, a dot matrix, which was spewing forth an endless roll of fascinating pattern into a susurrating pile that filled a corner of the room. All the lights in the lab had been switched off: the extraordinary brightness came only from the screens and the play of their contorted graphics across the myriad printouts. Compared to this grotto, the corridor and Common Room had been mere harbingers. From beneath the pile of snaking paper a leg protruded. Subhash picked it up and pulled and a body appeared. He checked his friend's breathing and felt his pulse but he seemed right enough. He half-dragged half-carried him to the Common Room where he laid him on the same bank of chairs on which he himself had slept. Then he hurried back to the lab to try and clear up some of the mess. Back to the top. |