UNSEEN EYEBEAMS

by Anthony Blake

Water fell into the glass along the gravitational differential. His hand shook but he was smiling, bathed in the fatigue of knowledge like a bride after a night of embraces. Instead of sensations, words formed in him of apposite conjunction. Thus, the water fell into sound. It was not poured; neither did it trickle down. In its unique manner, it translated itself along the gradient, multiplied and reconjoined. And then, in the translation, air and glass combined in sound; in their chord the symbols of another world. The number of the droplets thrown and fallen in impact and under the constraint of surface energy minimisation, their fragmentation and combinations also numbered -though in a quasi-finite arithmetic of indeterminate integers -the frequencies spiralling up and down the statistical columns reaching to the glass's rim, forms of catastrophe with an architecture of cusps founded on the modesty of conservation: these were commanded by an unseen score and made into a composition by an agreement older than the universe. Light refracted, diverged and re-assembled a semblance of its origins, encompassing the filling of the glass with mute articulation, synchronised in measures of retardation; softer than air, more precise than glass, the secret everywhere which hid everything so well that there was no resource but to a seeing outside the eye. Hands reached into view from some unfathomable yearning to exist. Appearance upon appearance, the world kept itself on display without cease.

The water was wet and from it he drank a knowledge that put to rest two thousand years of frustrated misconception. He was in an insanity of action without an audience. He poured water again, the world disclosing its absolutist mastery along the line of time. The tremors across the surface as he set the glass to rest on the table - strewn with headaches of information like cognitive strata were appalling. He remembered Rilke and the 'terror just able to bear' and did not know whether to thank God for the mute conspiracy which believed in the world as an assumption or to renounce forever the hope of a companion: time would unravel him again and bundle him up into the cocoon of people and their collective memories. The silent sound of the early hours, the pause in the habitual impresses of the diurnal cycle, lay about the table and came from the walls. It was listening. What could his presence say beside what was there or what was happening? It was only happening. He was questionable; though, even as that, he alone could give the question significance. The water there before him made him feel his existence as an excuse for being there. There was a warm family at home; crumpled bedclothes; the intelligent ignorance of the children; the obedient things of the human world all around. There' were transits to be made amidst the grinning caricatures of space put up in concrete and matics, A long tube connected him with his house, topologically immediate. The history of his thoughts was to be read like an information strip by the real observer he could never be.

The tracer had marked a small angle of rotation. He stared down at it and then at the linked devices. A state of panic welled up in him as he realised that the trace had no value outside of his interpretation: it was no proof. Shakily, he picked up the printout in which the theoretical potential of the water's multiple existence was calculated and plotted. He did not know' what to believe in, what to pray to, for the energy of determination to make this real. The silence was inhuman. He knew it as the mask of the angels who pulled the strips of thought that made the brains of the world pirouette through discovery, a dance designed to stir the organisms in a subtle auto-eroticism of prolonged self-dalliance.

He forced himself to enter the rotational data into the memory file. With deliberate self-mockery he went through the procedure of initiating analysis. Coldly, he reviewed the work of the last several months. And, he remembered the increasing effort required to return to this place of interrogation: how he would spend days preparing for his lectures and demonstrations of composition analysis, even involve himself in departmental politics, go on picnics with the kids, watch videos of fifty-year old movies; anything, except to come here and go through this perdition. The agony of purgatory was said to derive from having the vision of God without the power to draw near to Him. This was not God; but it was reality.

He could make the water falling into the glass portray the evolution of musical forms: a Fourier fugue. The beginnings and the endings were superdense in morphologies and, of course, could not be made to reveal the origins or the futures of music. Even the present was obscure since the method of aesthetic analysis was being incorporated into music itself. Perhaps in fifty years time the same procedures would show the nature of the compositions of today? The method redesigns itself; or was it that the nature of water would evolve? Was the method simply an expression of the times? Was it more than the sound of fountains in palace courtyards, the sea of Debussy or the breath of Casals?

Mirror, mirror, of the world, which is the truest thought of all?

He switched out the light and glanced back at the consoles with their LEDs, the shadowy lumps of assemblage up in the corners of the room, the silhouettes of the glass and pitcher on the desk. All he knew was that it could be done and that he had done it. But, the central discovery was impossible to prove; the new data was impossible to remember; the work could not even be defined. And the world was in travail.

'What have you been doing?'
'Researching,'
'Experimenting?'
'Listening, Seeing. Touching,'
'Why don't you go back to music?'
'Maybe I am. Right now, my concern is engineering.'
'You're making instruments?'
'Yes, think of me as an instrument-maker.'
'You always admired Spinoza'
'He should have been a composer.'
'You should have been a composer.'
'I thought about it too much.'
'I know. You do that.'
'What about this?'
'It's late, I've been weirding-out on my cycle,'
'Low on feedback, then?'
'Probably.'
'All this crap to organise genetic-cultural transmission?'
'Goodnight.'
'. . . .'
'Cyberfucker.'
'And so below, below, in time and space. I could get drunk, it's so unfashionable.'
'Not to have to plug and pull the switch?'
'The golden liquids of the past.'
'OK pour me one.'
He heard again the creation of his mind. The golden liquid swam in itself.
'A toast!'
'A toast. To reality and its construction.'
'May we be ever so unreal.'
'That we can love?'
'It's feedback time. Engineer something, will you?'

The micro-events of the penetration were impenetrable and he was grateful that he had long abandoned the archaic sensors (which had been the instigators of his advanced dilemma). To be there in what form and on what scale? He could not even define the parameters of the incursion. And would such penetration prove popular to qualify as acultural enrichment and avoid information tax? Another mindful and she was done to a turn. Autopilot to the shower and stand in Fourier accelerando, glissando, and so forth. An oxy-whiff to restore the scale of things.

Back to the back, to sleep. Perchance to dream, of how things seem here or there. The more rational conversations of tomorrow to be concerned with gaining his admission, of finding the steps, of establishing a foothold in the world of agencies and powers. Make it not a dream!

Taking a forkful of food, he reflected on the state of the world. What occasioned this indulgence? The realisation that he had no idea what the fork was made of. Of molecules, surely; but imprinted with a memory eager to unfold itself, reheat - to unleash the matrix. The food arrives complete with explodable tools for its administration. But, of what substance is this called forth? Made to be only rigid, formed and extended; an algebraic chemical made only of its manufacture; a matic stuff unlike the stuff of all the ages until now, holding no pleasures. There had been a world of metal, wood, clay and glass. He had tried to describe this world of substances to his children; had shown the things, but they had seen only what they were used for.

His grey-haired friend disturbed the reverie, inconsequentially asking after his family as a stranger might. 'It's interesting having children, ' he said. 'In what does the interest lie?' his friend enquired. 'I hardly know, ' he answered, 'because I hardly know them. This is part of my interest.'
'You find your lack of knowledge interesting?'
'That's not it. The interest is in what I do not know, which is what really matters - both to them and to myself.'
'It's increasingly rare for someone to feel that they do not know something that is important to them. A long time ago, it was the philosophic virtue, the foundation of education. Though, of course, it seemed then that they could find out what they did not know, or knew only through opinion and conditioning.'
'And now?'
'Now, ignorance is simply a market force. People have to be told of their ignorance and then given the answers. In this way, nobody comes to real knowledge of what they are missing.'
'I sometimes feel rather foolish attempting to get at these things all by myself, as if I were the first parent ever to experience this sense of lack. But, I cannot let the matter drop.'
The elder man peered at him. 'What "matter"?' he asked,
'I hardly know. Maybe it is matter that is missing. I was thinking about that just now. Everything is so well provided for in their education and the two of them are achieving well. They are coping with things that are far beyond me. All I have to go on is this sense of something missing.'
'Is that all?' His friend looked down into the profundities of his plate. 'Really?'
'Well, considering what the children are learning I have no grounds for complaint. No solid grounds that is. In many ways, they are far more effective than I ever was.'
'Really?' his friend asked again, in a probing way. 'Perhaps you believe that what your children are accomplishing is no more than an extension of the ability to use a telephone? They are hooking into a network with respect to which they are, like nearly everybody else, simply an appendage - or a parasite.'
He smiled. 'I know how fond you are of that biological analogy; but isn't it simply rhetoric?'
'I'm sorry to impose my views on you. Please go on with what you want to say.'
'You know the bases of the network far better than I. Without the synergic hierarchies, hardly anything would be possible now.'
His friend waved a fork deprecatingly, 'As I've told you before, the success of a system depends on its environment and in the present set-up, the system is its own environment. But, do I have to repeat such obvious ideas to you? If you want to talk to me about what you think, and then talk to me about what you think. Why are you being so evasive?'

He gazed off across the rows of little cubicles, punctuated by screens and became aware of the background sound of voices more than half of which were not actually there. ' Can I be subjective? Perhaps I want to retreat from objective knowledge into misty feelings of concern. Perhaps I am just looking for emotional nourishment. I'm turning away from synthesised musak to tunes you can whistle in the bath.'
'What's the matter with you? You used to be one of the most articulate men I knew. Why do you keep apologising? Especially to me. I've no interest in your imaginary weaknesses. Just think of your kids and yourself. What system can deal with that? You and they are the system, or the non-system. Home is where you start from. There is no context but yourself. You talk of the effectiveness and knowledge of your children without being clear about what you are referring to. What is effective is the system being transmitted through the children. What surprises you and tyrannises you about the young is that you are not in the same place in the network as they are. You think that they are creative and intelligent while you picture yourself as an old conditioned residue, unable to catch up. Just consider, as an experiment, the opposite point of view. Then, the young are just simulations while the old have a chance to become human.' The old friend paused to feed himself some more mouthfuls and he took the opportunity to say, 'So, we get most creative on our death-beds just when we are unable to do anything with it?'
'It could well be so. That's why there used to be so many deathbed conversions in the age of religion. How's the food?'

'Passable. What is it protecting us against this week?' 'What it did to us last week. What else do you want to talk about?'
'Well, tell me again what it is you do.' He had not expected this conversation to be so difficult - and the problems lay entirely with himself. Why could he not bring himself to spell out his concerns?
'What I really do I do all the time even if I am not aware of it. I have various sales-pitches because I have to earn a living from this one skill I have. Today, I'll call what I do "thought recognition" though I'm finding it damn hard to recognise any thought in you. It's easier to do retrospectively but I get paid by people who want to exploit the future ahead of time. '
'Well, tell your clients that the future is in a glass o£ water!'
'Are you going to explain or have you just gone mystical?'
He tried to focus.'It stems from a subjective experience. I'm tired of the technology of concepts and I want to have things as they are, Once upon a time people walked around the earth and when they had machines they were just like muscles, or aspects of the forces of the wind and water. Then they looked for little machines in the ether and became frustrated, so that it became the proper thing to look to results without bothering about what was there. Even when people learnt that they could not simply turn a handle and crank out the results but had to think in new ways, they gave up the search even more. Nobody knows what they are talking about anymore: it's all lost in the systems, which keep everything going. Even painting - and music - couldn't stem the tide, but followed this oblivion. Now, there is no theory of music and everyone does what they like. I'm not very coherent, I am afraid.' He threw his plate away and went on.
'My God, I feel embarrassed! I had lunch with you to sound you out and I am unable to be clear. This terrifies me.'

'It's part of my job to deal with the inarticulate. What I notice is that you are not bringing yourself into the picture much. You revert all the time to generalities. Tell me about "things as they are" and your children. Is there a connection?'
'Yes. What I am talking about - I mean, what I am concerned about, since I haven't expressed it at all well - is more than just a concern It is to do with real things, with what is objective. That's the point of all this: the great objective reality we all run round the outside of.'
'I get the drift now. You want to get in?'
'That's right, You've caught it. It is very strange that I could not simply tell you. Even now, I feel hot and shy. Why is that? No -never mind about that. The point is that I do not know how to connect up with the right agencies. I can't go further on my own.'
'Is there some special problem with linking up with others in this area?'
'Yes. Didn't you know?'
'I might if you would be a little more coherent about what agencies and define the area more clearly.' His friend looked at him from under his eyebrows assuming the air of a family doctor.
'Well - as far as I can make out - I am working in the area of trans-perceptual observation -'
'You are what!' his friend exclaimed and then went on, 'Oh, I see, you have come up against INSTRAM'
'And the regulations. I've been studying the stuff in the public domain. Those damn regulations. I don't know why they have to exist in that form. I know their rationale, but it's absurd. What they are doing is cornering the market on reality! They are denying people free access to what exists everywhere!'
'But, my friend, it does not exist unless it is observed. Yes, they had quite a problem setting up for a quantum-level business. But, the epistemology is on their side. They promise access to a reality that can only be observed through their instruments - that's correct isn't it? Therefore, that reality is their creation, because it could not exist without their means of observation. And, therefore, that reality is their commodity as much as the instruments are. The legislation is still being debated and it's raised turmoil everywhere with physicists putting in for royalties on the exploitation of quarks and the like.'
He grew very agitated, 'Yes, yes - but the point is that the reality is there anyway and is not created by the instruments. It's just like looking round this room.'
'So, what you are talking about can be called new senses.'
'The new senses. Yes. To hear at a rate a million times as fast, to see wave forms orthogonal to the electromagnetic ones, to touch objects finer than Planck's length. There is a bridgehead to another reality, and people ought to be going over it. Why hold them back?'
'Now, you touch the nerve. All I can say is: the regulations are a protection of people not only of markets. '
'Come off it! People are freer to stuff drugs in themselves, tamper with their brain patterns, and alter the genes of their children.'
'But only within certain well-worked out constraints. There are filters.'
'You can't know how much this is burning me up! They have an injunction on all similar work while the pundits battle it out. Wait! Why did you talk of filters? What does that imply?'
'Perhaps a slip of the tongue. Go back for the moment, to you and your children.'

'It's very simple, but I don't know how to put it,' He looked round for a way of expressing himself. 'I want to give them something; do something real for them. What can I do? Muddle them with some half-baked wisdom of age? Watch over their characters? Buy them the best software? Tell them moral stories? Teach them how to love? I can hardly love! And I don't want to teach them anything and get in their way. But, I want to be a real father, So, I want to give them reality - they do not have to learn or believe or follow anything.'
'A gift of reality? And I thought you were a modest man! '
'Well, what sort of man am I? Can I rest content with being an approximation to the statistical mean? Genius has gone out of the window - we are all too connected. '
'Have you ever read Rousseau?'
'The Noble Savage? No, but I've heard of the idea. That's not it at all. It should not matter how sophisticated you are or how naive you are. What matters is contact with reality. It's obvious that, within a decade or so, everyone will have caught up on the new access. But, I know it will be different then. Now is the time to do it for real. Do you know the composition by Lyton called The Annunciation?
'I've heard of it.'
'Well, I've studied it closely. In certain respects, it is a fuming back to the aleatoric days; but, the composer himself mingles with the audience before every performance - it's always live you know and never recorded or broadcast - and finds somebody to talk to. Then he uses the so-to-say feeling of that man or woman to guide the unfoldment of the piece. Nobody can recognise Lyton.'
'Go on. I've never been to a performance but I can understand what you are saying.' the grey-haired man relaxed back against his chair, closely observing his friend and his rising enthusiasm.
' There is a whole technicality in how he does it but, the point is that you go to a performance both longing and dreading to be the person. Lyton does it so well that people can actually experience the person he encounters. It's somehow objective - even though many of the audience can be deeply affected and even mentally disturbed.'
'And so - you want to be the person who gets to talk to reality?'
'But, not to hear myself - to hear something new, entirely different. To give my children the greatest gift of all - reality free of all prejudice and dullness.'
'Have you thought what it might do to them? And, if they were pioneers in this new conquest wouldn't something be expected or eve demanded of them?'
'I have thought about it. It has made me ask why we have not heard of the pioneers already. What has happened to them? Who are they?'
His friend leaned forward, 'Tell me why you are convinced that this new access has taken place? How could you know except by reading between the lines in obscure references?'

'I've tracked dowm all the new inserts they'va had placed in certain text books. There is a new access, alright.'
'Just think about these inserts. Do they give any definite information - such as new data, measurements, concepts?'
'No new data. What they do is to advocate new lines of research based on the new observations.'
'But, they do not give you the observations.'
'No, how could they? They are put in with a rider of being subject to future verification by conventional means. They are often called' "instrumented hypotheses"'
'So, where does your belief in these instruments come from? You are not a scientist. You cannot verify what they are saying, I doubt if you can even understand what they are saying,'
He felt giddy and unreal. His friend was pressing and giving no relief. An energy surged up from his guts into his throat and stuck there. The air hissed at him. His friend said, 'I think I know the answer. But, what interests me is why you cannot tell me. What's the matter?'
'I don't know. Just help me" What are you thinking?'
'Well, one thing is for sure: you believe that you have made a new access yourself. And you are stuck. As for the rest, I don't think you are in a fit state to discuss that right now.'
'Look, can you come round to my office tonight? Will you help me?' he blurted out,
'Sure'. There was a pause. The air tingled between palms. Death and life were in a shy embrace. The love in generations wound the helix up like a piece of elastic. He felt his eye-lids tremble,
'Are you part of this? Are you a filter or something?' he asked.
'Perhaps I am a filter in some sense. I'll have to think about that. But, I feel that I have to tell you that I am not part of the INSTRAM set-up, nor in any way connected with it. You will have to define for yourself where you fit in to the bigger picture and also what it is you want me to do.'
'I have been thinking of one thing - that I could open up an area under the heading of acultural enrichment - which would avoid the issue of information tax -'
'And get you outside the confines of the regulations. But, it does not sound, then, like a venture into direct reality. Would you lose something by that? Would that matter to you?'
'Yes, it would matter. But, I have to get this thing to work.' His friend was already rising from the table.

He was having trouble with the reactionaries in his class but damned if he was going to distort what he had to say to sweeten them up. The turning point in western music brought into being by Hauer and Schoenberg had to be understood if you were going to understand the special character of formal music at all. Otherwise why not just play whatever mush appeals?
'But, Dr Karl, none of this has anything to do with what music is-. All you are talking about is just the externals, the accidents of history, the technicalities - not what music means.'
He snapped back before he could stop himself, 'And what do you say it means? Can you say anything!'
The student was not even smug or obnoxious but said, in all earnestness, ' What it means is in people. How they feel it. It is nothing but feeling.'
Dr Karl tried to control the anger flaring up in him, amazed at his own reaction; but, the prospect of Farley's visit that night and what hung on it had made him frightened. He had to make a stand. He had to express himself. He rose to his feet.
'I'm going to say the same thing again, but only once. If, at the end of what I say, you still don't like it, then you can leave and finish the course how you want through your own consoles.' He stared at their blank faces, hating himself for his sense of insecurity. He knew music and yet he was losing out to these idiots. At the back of his mind something looked down at him and wondered if he were really a defender of knowledge against the savages. Echoes of the second string quartet haunted him and he desperately wanted them to hear it as he did.
'It may be hard for you to accept, but I have no rejection of your feeling that what matters in music is how it makes you or others feel. Your feeling is your feeling and you can't get out of it and replace it with another feeling you don't have. But - how can I put it? - your feelings can only hear what you are open to hear. What you hear depends on what you understand and understanding involves the whole of you. You students all have, potentially, good minds or you would not be here. You have capacities to know as well as feel. And I tell you that music is a way of knowledge; an ancient one, too If you deny that, then you deny something in yourselves.' Please don't deny this, he said to himself. Please do not let my children ever 'deny it,
' There have been men who have realised music as a way of knowledge. Some must have been in folk song. But, some have brought into being a will, or a question. It is like the human being trying to break out of his human form and become absolutely clear. It is like the soul finding itself. There is a current in music - of an energy that comes out of our experience of how reality is. Because music appears to give us no information but itself we first find, when we listen, that we are that information. As I am; I listen. And, great music occupies the whole of our attention. It is not to be had with something else at the same time. That is why, at times, great music must bring us near to boredom. Its demands are as absolute as they can be.
'Do you remember that story I told of Schoenberg conscripted into the Austrian army, when he was asked whether he was the Schoenberg? And he said - somebody had to be. It was music that had to be. Music was his master, his guru. For others, music is only a muse, a voice in the air, whispering. In Schoenberg, music was the will, the sole authority. For you see, music commands composers to appear; it develops them from itself.' Would that music were my master, he thought. Now, I do not know who gives me orders.
'Stravinsky had to wait until he had exhausted other lines before h could accept serialism. It had to become neutral, not the way of another composer. But, already in its inception by Schoenberg and then by Webern, it was neutral. It was in music itself, as inevitable as a modulation in a Beethoven symphony.
'Of course, it is a poor way of speaking to say that music did this or does that, as if it were some agency. But it also wrong to say that music is something made up by people to make them feel good. Their feeling good - your feeling good - is a poor reflection of what there is in music. And, what is there in music? I cannot say. That is for music to say. If you can hear, there is nothing but music; who can say what it reveals? But, remember, there is as much a mystery in the power of mathematics to reveal the relationships of the real world as there is in the power of music to shape our sense of reality. We do not know whereof music speaks. Maybe it is pure speech, which does not need to refer to anything. Maybe it is action without action and therefore the will itself. Maybe it is duration without time.
Of course, Schoenberg is only an atom in the whole of music; but he enabled music to go on in his time. It was a time like no other in the history of music. It was an incredible risk he seems to have taken.' As I am taking, he thought, though the risk stems from the simple thing of believing in what I know to be true.
'Schoenberg's step would only work if other composers heard the same implications in previous music as he did. His was an act of war against the inarticulate. It was a miracle that he found Berg and Webern - associates of such creative and distinctive genius, 'And, where are my associates?' he asked himself. What is wrong that I am alone? He was well aware of the restlessness in the class. He looked out on them and his eyes rested on the willowy blond who always sat near the door. What a pity that she would no longer be there. She reminded him not only of sex but also, strangely, of 'Pierrot Lunaire', He saw her in his imagination standing by a willow tree in the moonlight, whispering in a husky voice of the pleasures the other side of madness. She should be capable of understanding and liking his work; but, in all probability, she was just a stupid bitch, full of emotion and empty of secrets. He tried to shake off the dream, which made him always so sad and lonely.

'We might say that he failed to complete the job of making the new means of perception. Music had to go on. He had to hand the task he had on to others who, almost, had to start all over again and check everything out again - as Stravinsky did. The handing on of the task is the history of music. In a sense, it is here to fail - until the time comes.'
The lecture finished in disorder. Several of the students walked out noisily saying they were going to complain to the authorities. Others chatted amongst themselves, ridiculing his ideas. A few gathered round his desk to spew out admiring comments, which he found particularly distasteful. To his surprise, the willowy blond remained seated, staring fixedly in his direction. Ignoring the cluster around him, he switched on a recording of the second string quartet and closed his eyes. After a while, he felt recovered enough to open them again. The blonde had her head down on her arms. A young man sat next to her with his hand resting on her shoulder. He was smiling. As sometimes happened, he was hearing the piece afresh. The surface of intimate and dense Viennese culture dissolved away to leave something beyond its time Just at that certain transit in the second movement, the room grew still. Completely at variance with his purist inclinations, he used his remote to locate and bring in over the quartet Lyton's own piece, which had been written as a commentary and testament to Schoenberg's work in the twenties of the last century. The work goes on, he thought.

Outside in the corridor, the blonde and her companion came after him. She caught hold of him and blurted out, 'Did you mean that last bit?' 'I meant all of it!' he snapped back. 'I mean, were you actually talking about something real at the end?' she insisted, not at all affected by his manner. Close to, he found she had steady Gary eyes. She went on, 'It isn't just music, is it?'
'Well, it really is music. I've convinced myself today of it. One day, I might be able to show you what I mean and not just talk.' in generalities, he added to himself, remembering his old friend's remarks.

Then, the young man spoke, ' There is a small group of us who are trying to break out of the system that confines us into something new. I feel you are on the same wavelength. Would you meet with us sometime?'

He was suddenly tired, 'I've a job to do. Somebody has to do it,'' and he brushed them aside to head for his office.

The cold night drew him down. Alice went to and fro with exactitude, arranging. She made no comment on the wide-open window, gaping to the night and letting chill smells in. It was just possible for him to see some stars. There they were, out there, positioned like a faint notice in the sky that had been around far too long to be intelligible. Below, where he eyes fell, were the creatures of sense fabricating the world, which was still his world, too.
'Alice, why the hell did you marry me?' he asked and she smiled in a kind of unabashed ignorance and chagrin and came over and hugged him a little too thoroughly. She looked at him with an old look and then dropped her gaze, admitting to him that she was not able or willing to rescue him from his own problem by putting into words something to bridge the gap between them. 'It's OK' he said, touching her hand. 'We've no chance of seeing ourselves, really. No way of getting to know what we are except by living and doing things like getting married and having children.'
'Are you bored again?' she muttered, glancing down with him on the street below.
'That doesn't come into it. What if I told you I was going to revolutionise our lives, do something that would make everything completely different, even if we didn't start by realising it? What if I said that I am going crazy with what I see as possible?
She looked miserable. The burden of reality put upon her made her shrink down. He felt a kind of pity and even hated himself a little for the absolute indifference of reality. For her, there was no choice. For him, there appeared to be a choice, but that was a delusion. 'I'll always stand behind you,' she said, appealing to him to speak only vaguely and in metaphors and hide from her the brutality fixed in him. He wondered to himself if she were just a woman. But, then, not entirely a woman: not a phenomenon, a pure passion, a physical presence exceeding any mental value; but a social creature. What was the female hell? 'You have a lot to put up with,' he said in appeasement,
'No,' she said, 'No. You don't understand. It's OK what you try to do. I know you won't understand, this, but it's true. You're not the only one that is alone. I can't tell you about me. But what you can do for me is to make yourself happy, really do what you want to do. Is it your music? Are you going to start composing again? These instruments you work with - are they for your music?
Usually, they were only together when the kids were around as well or when he crawled into bed in the early hours. It was strange to be holding a conversation with her. 'Let's try something,' he said, disentangling himself and going over to his case. It worried him that he did not know whether he was doing this out of desperation or, even, out of some twisted feeling of hate for her. Perhaps he wanted to punish her for not understanding. And, yet, what he was going to do for her was the greatest gift he could give anyone. The lapel of her green blouse was caught by the breeze as he gently sat her in the chair after carrying over the apparatus. He arranged the carrier harness and fixed the lens support to the window ledge. 'What's this? Some kind of telescope she asked anxiously.
'No. More like a microscope. Now, listen. Think of what is in front of you - say about one meter away. The air and the dust. The sound and the light. It's all filtering through that point right now. It's telling you that it's night and in the city and there you are in this room looking out. Are you concentrating?'
'I'm trying. I find it a bit hard to get hold of.'
'Remember what we used to do years ago - inventing strange colour and machines; when we used to build pictures in our minds together She nodded, 'That was a long time ago,' she murmured, 'Forget how long ago it was. Get into that mood again. Can you do that?' Without waiting for an answer, he left her and went over to the play console, located the right disc and operated the scanner. The strange sounds of the Tibetan Cantos filled the room - music which she ha: said she always hated but which opened her up like nothing else. 'Alice, start looking through that lens in front of you; but keep your mind on that spot that I described.' Slowly he increased the volume.

Her reaction was far more rapid than he had anticipated. 'It's not right!' she burst out. 'What are you doing to me? What is this stuff?' 'That is reality! ' he shouted above the music, 'And I want to give it to the kids to play with!'
'But - it's horrible! I don't know what it is!'
'No! It is not horrible. Think of it like music you are not used to. He knelt beside her. 'You went through pain having the kids. This is like that. This is more than a child. It can make people into new children.' Casting around for something to help, he thought of Rilke and went to the bookshelves, turning down the music as he went. She lay back in the chair, her eyes closed. He plucked The Duino Elegies from the shelves and began thumbing through the pager. Could she even hear these verses? She had never recognised or understood that moment of pausing by the window for the sake of the violin sounding. But, he went ahead and read to her, softly, walking up and down. At least, it might help to soothe her.
When he paused and glanced towards her, he became very fond. He did not know what people were doing in the midst of reality - and h-found that amusing and touching at the same time. The title of D. H. Lawrence's 'Apocalypse Now' came to him. It was always the end of the world when a new one was approaching: the time of the flood, when people lost the meaning of their lives because the king died and another came. And those little inserts in the textbooks were the sign of those textbooks' watery death. And God would have to make a new covenant with man. He said to her, 'I can tell you that this is already being done by people. Just a few, but it is happening.'
'What do you mean? What does it mean? You never warned me that it would be like this.'
'It's too simple to say much about before you've had it happen to you. I don't know what it means. It does not have to mean anything. But, tonight, I tell you that I am scared, too; and I wish you were with me. It's not just a new step in physics or psychology. It's the end of the world as we know it. ' He laughed. 'Without you, or somebody, I shall go crazy. It's a real risk. And I won't stop because I can't.' He took the apparatus off her and she said to him, 'It's as if there could be terrible creatures brought in by using that thing. I felt so unprotected. You'd gone. Everything had gone. It was all different. I couldn't stand any of it.'
'But, you could learn. That must be so. We couldn't get there if it was impossible to learn. What I want to tell you, though, is the fear can destroy. Maybe they will have to destroy this thing so that the world can go on.'
She turned away from him, 'I'll never get used to that,' she said. He could see that she had-enough and he was sad and angry with himself for even trying. He said to her brusquely, 'It's reality. The reality we have not been able to get at before.'
'You mean that I was actually looking at something out there?' she asked with horror.
'Yes! It is like that -' she turned pale and rushed into the bathroom and he could hear the noises of her vomiting. 'That was just one aspect!' he yelled to her. When she came out, she looked at him as a badly treated animal might. 'Why did you do this to me?' she whispered.

'I have to find out how to introduce this to people - as it is, If I had softened it up, prepared you, it would have been just a show. But, now you know that it is like that. But, it is not "horrible"! It just is like that. Your brain cannot take it now; but it can learn. That is one of the strangest features of this thing. It is as if the brain has built in it this capacity for something that no living creature would ever have needed. How is it there?'

They looked at each other across the room and heard the sounds of the street coming from below. He felt his words fall into a vacuum. She turned and went into the bedroom, leaving him to take his seat once more and enjoy his bitter memories.

The meeting with his friend had gone badly. In fact, the whole incident was a personal disaster and loss. As his wife went to bed, the glow of the sleep-lights just visible beyond the screen, he went over his memories and reconstructed the event; motivated, in part, by a desire to punish himself. The reactions of those he had felt close to had been unforeseen; they implied that nobody would be able to appreciate what he had done, objectively. If he were cast as the Faustus of the present time, then he was a pretty weak and uncertain one. He was more like Adrian Leverkhun's bourgeois companion than the composer himself was. It would be best to abandon all pretence to scientific status and leave a legend. What could he do? Despoil his daughter? Set fire to his workplace? Disappear to another planet? Shaking his head as if to throw off these thoughts as foreign bodies, he focussed on that awful hour spent with Farley earlier that night.

His friend had been courteous but, plainly, holding himself aloof and detached. Dr Karl had rushed to energise the apparatus and engage the auditory unit. His preparation of the sound environment had been perfect. The year spent in absorbing Lyton's method of personal composition had been a crucial step; he was able now, almost instinctively, to select the appropriate inception agent for anyone he knew. This he had proved to his satisfaction time and again but today was the first occasion on which it would be the prelude to entering the new access for someone other than himself. Within ten minutes of his arrival, Farley was invested with the halo of the instrument and in a ready state. The water trickled beside him and the instruments signified by their readings that the man was hearing with new ears.

There had been little visible response - only a few signs of tension. At one moment, perhaps, he whispered something that Dr Karl failed to catch. When the period was over, his friend had sat quite still at one time nodding as if to a thought that had occurred to him. The he spoke, ' So, you have to induce a state in the subject. I am surprised how effective you are.'
Dr Karl rushed to explain. 'That is what I call inception. It is to enable the brain to take in the new input. I personally do not need it anymore; something has been permanently rotated in my brain. It takes time for that to happen.'
His friend then said, 'I was aware of a strong feeling. That is what remains with me.'
'What of the perceptions? Can you not recall the sense of having new perceptions?'
Farley replied curtly, 'You should, know that perceptions in the human sense are impossible without conceptual activity and I have no recall of any new mode of conception. There were space and time, I suppose. There were strange sounds. Ho, what I can recall is only feeling.'
Dr Karl remembered his harangue of the class that afternoon. He was impatient having to go over the same ground - above all, with this man. 'There will have been a slight change in your brain, which is some measure of what you call conceptual shift, I can measure it, if you like.'
'It doesn't matter.' His friend sounded almost weary. Why was he not in ecstasy or shock? Farley unbuttoned the apparatus and held it in his hands, looking at it carefully. 'Where did you get this?' he asked.
'I didn't get it anywhere. I made it.'
'But, how did you make it? What was your model?'
'Why do you assume that I have stolen it from somewhere or copied it? You know that is impossible anyway. Look, I put that thing together - and others like it. I can make them work. Which means that, sooner or later, they are going to be available everywhere. I've tried to find out what else is going on like this, but all I come up against is INSTRAM. That's why I came to you.'
'Wait. You are telling me that you found out how to make these things? But, how? It's got nothing to do with your field. You're a musicologist and composer of sorts -'
'- I was.'
'All right - you were a composer of sorts. Now you claim to be making a scientific revolution in your own backyard. It is hardly possible. Dr Karl stared at him with that emptiness and desperation that comes from the evaporation of trust. 'Do you think I am some kind of agent from another enterprise trying to cross wires with INSTRAM?' he asked, 'It's not true. I am on my own. I don't know whom to trust to help me develop what I have found. Just what are you representing? Who are you an agent for?' Farley said nothing. Karl blurted out, 'Why can't you act like a friend instead of asking all these fool questions?'
Farley sighed. 'A friend sometimes has to do something that looks unfriendly - out of friendship. You want to be objective about all this? Well, then, I am helping you to be objective. You've made some pretty extravagant claims for these devices. I'm simply asking you to tell me how it happened that you came to make them.' Karl frowned. 'It came out over several months. Look - what do you mean, what happened? I worked at it and struck lucky. Do you want the patent specification?'
His friend looked at him and said with unusual intensity, 'Try to grasp that you are not telling me anything, while you are protesting, all the time. How, either you are jealous of your secrets - which I don't think is the main thing - or you honestly, do not know what happened. Can you tell me which it is?'
Dr Karl looked at him in puzzlement. At the back of his mind, he wondered why he was puzzled. The investigation had consumed him even though he had, increasingly, to force himself to continue. At the same time, he could not avoid being drawn back into it, Wasn't it always like that? Some insight and then a lot of work producing the architecture, the flesh and blood of the beast; the accumulation of days and months and even years of blind alleys and stupid mistakes?

His friend stared at him. 'I begin to suspect, Karl, that you do not know what happened or why, Try and look at it in this way. Look back over the last year or so and try to find yourself in the picture.' Dr Karl felt embarrassed and impatient. What was the point of this interrogation? Why this psychological probing into the process of his discovery? What had he done? Wasn't it obvious? He had invented a way of new access, an instrumentation of a new category. The universe was calling out - the true universe, things as they are in themselves, the absolution of mankind from evolved prejudice, the neutralisation even of Original Sin . . . Farley broke into his thoughts. 'Let me put in this way. You have devised a new instrumentation, which offers a new order of experience. You say that this gives access to reality - to the reality of objects. Now, what of the subject? What about you? Have you had a new access to yourself?'
'What does it matter about me? Can't you see that the whole point of this is that it is objective? Why do you go on and on about me and the irrelevant details of my work? Why should these instruments give any special access to the subject? Of course, I'm not something apart from these things and their discovery -I am not some kind of hovering ego registering my progress, what I am doing and why I am doing it.' But he was thinking to himself that, somehow, he was lying. And his friend said, 'You are lying, The two of them locked glances, then his friend got up and walked across the room. He turned as he neared the door and looked round at Dr Karl and at the apparatus and said to him, 'What you think you have done is impossible and I do not believe you.' The words came like a blow to his stomach. He stuttered, 'But - you heard. I know that you did,'
'I had an experience. It was totally meaningless to me. I consider it as one of your compositions. Very powerful, but a little obscure.' Dr Karl looked at the figure across the room and suddenly felt that the man was changed. It was if one man had come in and another was leaving. Farley smiled whimsically at him. 'You see me as changed, perhaps. You have, I suspect, no idea what your instruments (as you call them? do for other people. You are like Beethoven composing when he was deaf or Charles Ives who became incapable of hearing anything except his own compositions. Your idea that these instruments give a new access to objects is a delusion - all they can give is an experience. I might even get to appreciate it. But, that does not make it real.'
Dr Karl stared at him, horrified. Farley smiled and added, 'Please don't get upset. Keep in touch. Who knows, I might change my mind? And remember that whenever you have anything definite to tell me I shall be glad to listen to you. Goodnight,' And he left, the door shutting on the heart of the man left behind. Karl was in a state of panic and rage. The only thing left for him to do, he did; entering the new world he did not understand and could hardly remember. Before he made his disconsolate way home, he made himself sit and write, in an assumed sobriety and optimism.

For the moment, I still deal in implications rather than in facts. As I have noted before, the retention of new facts is made difficult by the generic intention to establish facts linguistically. Really new facts require new language - or new languaging. Outside of poetry - and even there, it probably also applies - there has to be a community engaged in the new access. The new language evolves as a part of their mutual action; later on, the terms of the language are employed by people who are incapable of understanding their creation. Thus, as always, the intention out of which language is born is turned into a habit of speaking which determines how people perceive the world. The man making a new access by himself must be a poet - he cannot be a scientist, And, somehow, it is true that the poet demands of people that they go back to the origins before the things had been said,
But, I speak of implications. What is before me now is the question of plurality of access. The alternative access that I have instrumented must be only one out of innumerable possibilities. If I can come to this one, then others can come to different ones, What is it that can encompass all these? Is there a total structure of reality such -hat all modes of perception are arranged in order; or, are there an infinite number of them, a plenum. The ordinary man regards perception as all of a piece. He does not even contemplate the mystery of the conjunction of sight with sound. Perhaps I have been naive in supposing that my new access fits as a matter of course with the same single reality that includes the old also? The relief I have had from finding this new access is being superseded by a Pascalian terror of the infinite. But, there are not 'infinite spaces' there are 'infinite plenums'.
All of science rests on the reference plane of our ordinary perceptions. Once that plane becomes simply one out of many that are possible, then the science we have becomes just one of many. This makes me think that perhaps, indeed there was an alternative Chinese science as some have suspected; or, once upon a time, a real alchemy. Perhaps, too, the ancient ways which look so primitive to us today were also genuine. All these had their own reference planes - which were different from that of today. After all, in "many ways, the reference plane of the everyday and obvious today is' the technological one which has been fabricated over the last few hundred years. The 'givenness' of our perception is not a cosmological constant, but subject to variation in space and time. The question then remains: what is it that harmonises all these reference planes? The new access does not replace and do away with the old one (though, maybe it will, in time!). It is only an alternative to the old one, which shows things differently, especially in the micro-world. I know, for example, how light 'looks' - or, at least, that it does look like something and is not 'dark' as it appears in the usual reference plane. Perhaps INSTRAM have locked into a different plane to mine? Perhaps there are many other groups and individuals? At the moment, we have no way of establishing what is going on as a whole. It is as if we were living in the Stone Age and having to beat a path to the next settlement to find out if there is anyone else who has the idea of metal tools.

They had had an unexpected talk in his study. Initially, she had tried to persuade him to give his support to the student group -which had styled itself as the CD group - CD standing for cognitive dissonance' - but he carefully explained what he saw as the irrelevance of ideological attitudes to his own work. She was not convinced. That part of the conversation unresolved, they turned to Schoenberg and went on to Webern, Xenakis and more contemporary composers. The room became filled with episodes of music; sometimes two or three pieces were playing at once. Karl found himself talking to her about teaching.
'Every teacher has a problem in being a teacher. He has to hand over the tools without handing over the prejudice locked into his use of them. He has to convey his enthusiasm without coating his students with the second-hand garments of his own past insights. He has to teach so well that the student no longer feels he is a teacher.'
'Then, what is he?' she asked. 'What do you want to see yourself as?

'I can't say. It is to do with something that I feel with my own children too. I want to point the way, but not the way I travelled to get to the pointing. I don't want to teach from the past, in terms of what has happened to me. What use is that to tie young, living in a different world? Yet, I suppose I must: it is my job to sum up the past and make it manageable for you - so that you can then go on into the future. Or the future can then come into you and make itself apparent. You know, I had a friend who told me something very interesting. He said the younger generation could be regarded as more conditioned than the old - that is, more susceptible to the system in which they existed. So that the teacher, for example, would be more of the future than the student. I can see a truth in that. I can see how young people soak up the most fleeting things of the present and fail to see what is developing around them. Very possibly, I am caught up in some sentimental idea that the young are open; when there is not much evidence for that.'
She nodded and smiled at him. 'It takes a lot to be able to live in an open way. I think your friend was right and you are being sentimental. I look around and nearly all the students are just rerunning the identity problems their parents had according to the up-to-date fashions. They just want to fit in better and have everything go smoother. They are anarchic only if it is in fashion.'
'So', he asked her, 'What about this group of yours?'
'I must have given you a bad impression. We try. It's not just talking; we are trying to find ways of doing something about the situation. Because we feel that something is dying inside us, the way things are. We are not going to sabotage the computers or anything like that. We are going to make ourselves different and independent.'
'But, you don't know how?' He said it half as a question and half as a statement.
'That does not really matter. It is the aim that counts. You must know that. I think you are in the same boat, really. But, you are locked into your music and your own thoughts and seem to hoping the something will change of itself -'

'I haven't just been dreaming! It's not just dreams! It has to do with solid fact - and changing the facts.' His staccato manner faltered and his voice tailed away into an inscrutable neutrality. Looking at her sideways, he felt impelled to shift the grounds of the conversation. She smiled and asked, 'Let's stick to music, shall we? I understand, that you are something of a composer yourself though I have not had the pleasure of hearing any of your material,'
She bit her lip. 'I don't like to talk about my music very much. There are problems there, which are all bound up with what I have bee-trying to express to you. I -' she hesitated and then went on, 'I love music and love working with it; but something is spoiled by the way in which it is done. When I was working on a piece, it was fine; but, when it came to be instrumented and ^.KS. taped, it seemed to become something else. I can't seem to find my own voice. It was my dream to become a composer but I never get to hear my music. So, I don't want to talk about it, please.'

'All you are left with is some aims?' 'Yes, if you like. I - we - have no means.'

'But, that is the core of the problem: the means. The core of it all is to start from an objective basis. It is not enough to have subjective aims. There have to be new facts; a new order of fact. That was how religion and then science changed the world. People only change when they see the world differently.'
'It's our aim to see the world differently!'
'That's not enough. You think that you can change things through ideas and concepts and appeals to feelings. None of that is fundamental enough. You cannot know what I'm talking about right now. Maybe, though, one day you might.'
She stared at him. 'Just what have you got locked up in your cupboard, Dr Karl?'
'An ontological composition.'

Ever since political and even insurgent activity had been made part of higher education, it had made the organization of learning a very complex job. The reactionaries who had rejected his classes agitated to have him downgraded and his salary was reduced as a consequence. The normal procedure was for the lecturer to mount a counter-action such as using his influence to cut off access to certain computer facilities. When his terminal had transmitted data on his downgrading there was also thrown up a menu on retaliatory tactics. He ignored the menu and, instead, had posted through the network a notice on the nature of teaching, making it a personal statement very much on the lines he had discussed with the girl. Certain ethical committees were drawn into the fray and Dr Karl found himself embroiled in discussions on the relativity of choice between teacher and student. It was inevitable that he ended up closeted with the CD group even though he told himself that he had no idea how he had managed to manoeuvre himself into doing what he had decided not to do. Angry at the whole affair, he adopted an aggressive stance and argued and went on arguing on behalf of objective reality. He rejected everything they had to say to him and behaved thoroughly unreasonable He even made himself absurd and brought things to head by flouncing out in a tantrum, calling them a bunch of idiots. Sitting in his office afterwards, he wondered what had come over him.

Then, he was called up by five members of the group. Much to his surprise they volunteered to work with him and put themselves under his direction. They said that they were tired of discussion and wanting the true discipline of learning. The girl was not one of them. This seemed to make him even crazier: they had asked for the discipline of learning and they were going to get it. After two weeks of intensive work on the information content of music he had lost three of the initial volunteers. The two that were left Dr Karl found himself hating intensely and he made them work even harder. Reaching a point of despair in which he could hardly stand himself, he was rescued by the girl turning up. Her boy friend was not with her and he made no inquiries after him. He denied himself any feeling of pleasure at seeing her. In a dictatorial mood, he took her aside and said, 'You have a place in composition. There are already works being made in you; but, you do not know how to make them happen. The compositions are difficult. You cannot be content with a static perfection or a restablization of music. The trouble is that you cannot be content with music at all. What I am doing is more than music. You - you have not yet found the connection between music and reality. You doubt that I really have it. You are almost afraid of me. But, nothing less than objective reality will ever satisfy you. So - you kept away because this was a matter of life and death for you. Now, you are here and have to accept what I do. But, I am not going to give anything to you. What we are doing looks just like musical analysis; but you are not surprised, are you.? You know that I am not going to give you any proofs! Yet, you trust me.'
She looked strained and unhappy. 'I got very angry with you when you walked out. I thought that I could forget you and your work and carry on by myself. But, everything went sour on me; became pointless and empty. I suppose that I have nowhere else to go. I have to trust you. I must be part of it.'
'We can work with that,' he said and left the subject.

He subjected her and the others to the maximum pressure he could muster, until they were suffering from a kind of intellectual and emotional stress. They had to create models of the world-views implicit in single phrases of music; they were even forced to invent entire fictions that they knew to be false and justify them against his attacks. He made them criss-cross the boundaries between analysis, interpretation and fantasy, changing his own ground to de-stabilise any of their assumptions. At the same time, they had to listen to various performances of classical pieces and learn to discriminate between ever more fine nuances. It was entirely a process that gave no sense of any end or accomplishment in sight. Then he would ask them to hear, to see and to touch. And to describe what was there, both in words and in composition. It was a forcing house of perception. Oftentimes, the group became demoralised or aggravated to the point of simmering resentment that occasionally exploded into violent argument. When anyone disagreed, they were sent away and to come back when they would confess that they were mistaken,
The musical appearance of the group's work provided a useful shield. It was not long before the administration made enquiries about his project work. Dr Karl told them that he was trying to set up a new course to offset his loss of earnings. He became obsessed with the idea that Farley had intervened to cause him trouble, even though he had no place in the organization. They still met, from time to time, often at Farley's instigation; but neither of them made any explicit reference to the incident, which had created a gap between them. Dr Karl could still not credit his friend's apparent disregard for what he was doing. Farley asked about his teaching work and he gave some guarded answers.

Inevitably, it was Carolyn, the girl in the group, that with whom he tried the instrumentation. She had asked for it, in so many words. Once, when he asked the group to define the meaning of the work he was conducting with them, it was she who pointed out, 'It raises questions which cannot be answered in terms of what we actually register. It is as if you are appealing to a different order of experience.' Later on, she asked him directly, 'Do you believe there can be a different access to reality; something to provide an objective basis for knowing things which are, ordinarily just a matter for discussion and speculation?'
He had answered, 'Belief would be a contradiction. What I am doing rests on the fact of a different reality. I say "Reality" because it can be made as plain as that glass of water over there.'

The trigger for the exposure of Carolyn to the apparatus came in the form of a note in one of the more esoteric music journals, 'Review of Possible Music'. It had stated quite baldly that INSTRAM was doing research on the perception of sound and hoped to throw light on compositional genius. It was couched in a psychophysical way, but he saw it as a harbinger of a more public face. INSTRAM was seeking ways of introducing its work to the world at large,
He told her that he had something interesting to introduce to her, which would throw light on his purpose. The effect on her was startling. Swaying in the chair, she began to weep. 'I know this stuff. I have heard it before. I have wanted to hear it. It changes everything. There is a different order of things. Sounds come out of the energy I saw. But, now, I don't have it. It can't be held. I cannot remember the sounds. It is like I am back in prison.'
He looked down at her, remembering the utterly different reaction of his friend, Farley, and felt a burden lifted from him; but the memory held him back from reaching for her. Instead, his hand came to rest, lightly, on her shoulder - as if to reassure him that' she was real. The thought made him shudder: what was sitting in the chair? Through her tears, she broke out, 'Tell me it's not imagination. Convince me that it is more than an experience - that something different really happened. Please don't let this be just an experience! '
'Why?' he said, intensely. 'Isn't an experience enough?'
She looked up at him, white-faced. 'Why do you say that? After all you've told me. There has to be a different world than the one we know. It is the only way out. Are you just cheating as well, peddling dreams?'
Urgently, he seized her hand. 'You tell me. You're on your own. Nothing that I can say can help. It can't be a matter of words. Now, you have to be responsible for what you know - against all the world, maybe. We have to get beyond persuading each other. It's there or it is not. which is it?'
She pushed him away and leaned beck, staring at him. 'It's there. But, I could never explain it. I've been there. You have to go there to know.'

She got up from the chair and walked up and down the room, bursting out. 'My God! I liked it! I loved it! It's a treasure house. But, where is it? Does one go off somewhere?'

'You have to find out,' he told her. 'Are you prepared to do more of this and find out? I don't want to influence you. It has to be you that does it.'

She had agreed, because she wanted that world for her own. Dr Karl was not sure whether she understood her role; but, he had tied his own hands by insisting on her independence. Later, the other members of his tutorial group had been introduced to the instrumentation -with varying results. One broke all contact with him immediately afterwards. The other was confused and anxious and unable to make anything of it.

Carolyn's boyfriend tried to keep in touch with her. They had had an arrangement in which either could call on the other for sexual release but now Carolyn tended to be unavailable. It had been one of those rare harmonious and convenient arrangements, which are only fully appreciated in retrospect. Together, they had not even discussed politics. When they met in bed, it was only for the play of their bodies. Carolyn found that it helped her to keep a freer mind. Ideas were not mixed up with her bodily chemistry; effective relationships were not entangled in sexual posturings and personalities. He used to go to her when his thinking was confused - and he came away feeling sharper. This mutually beneficial arrangement deteriorated rapidly after Carolyn's involvement with Karl. Since Reagan had kept out of the musicologist's sphere of influence, Carolyn felt she was involved in a secretive relationship, however cerebral in fact it was. It was no longer easy to let Reagan in, draw the curtains and undress, slide into the rhythms and warmth of his embraces; it was no longer the natural thing to do. She was also feeling twisted inside by the projections she was making. Reagan began to appear to her as a spy, using her to gain access to Karl's secret work. Suspicions entered their conversations. As is usual with people, at the first signs of this she made strenuous efforts to eliminate such psychological aberrations - and became more strained and less herself in their relationship as a result. To which Reagan reacted in his turn and so provided her unconscious with the specious confirmation it was seeking.
She began to introduce into their meetings silly talk: asking him if he really still desired her, or about other girls; or, simply, about what he was going to do with his life. She always regretted it and, oftentimes, even while prattling on in such a vein, something in her coolly appraised her degeneracy and helplessness. This made her suffer. So, the relationship became one of suffering and began to take its meaning from her inner torment: it became its own opposite. As for Reagan, his own sense of helplessness increased. He realised how much he had benefited from her and felt an obligation towards her; even though his reason told him that his sense of obligation was a sentiment binding him to the patterns of foolish behaviour which were of no benefit to either of them. As is the way, he felt he had to demonstrate his sense of obligation by 'caring' about her and telling her so: which was to burden her with irrelevant and false values, obscuring her natural character, her quiet state of harmony, the listening deep within her which had enabled her to find a communication with the work of Dr Karl.

They began to quarrel about Karl and Carolyn's involvement with him. She was an impotent witness to this futile descent. She told him the she blamed him for continuing to visit her. Both of them approached the bed dreading the almost inevitable trigger, which would release unkind recriminations, suspicions and misunderstandings that would then lead to his angry exit. The affair came to a close when Carolyn finally slammed the door in his face. She told him not to come back and, after he had left, cried a long time. Her mind was so confused she began to wonder whether she was 'in love' with him -a vague turn of phrase still popular amongst people, but one which £ she had previously eschewed with an inborn sense of reality. In her teens, she had reasoned with herself that the only possible significant information contained in the phrase 'in love' must derive from cognition of the future, a recognition of the potential of a combination of two people, which was more than genetics. But now, she sank low enough to go over and over the past in the futile pursuit of trying to make a failure meaningful, trying to reverse through emotion a chain of causation which was, in fact, only too simple to grasp as inevitable.

Reagan occupied himself with his own career, taking up research into the sociology of music which gave him a more detached and satisfying contact with both music and politics than he had ever had before. Mozart became his hero as the composer first able to begin to break from the tyranny of patronage. Then, Amadeus became a class-traitor, next a mere idol of the bourgeois, next the supreme technician or artisan, next the founder of a revolutionary pattern of artistic creation, the harbinger of romanticism, next a representative of the death-throes of religion, but next a new prophet and so on. In brief, Reagan enjoyed Mozart a great deal and made good mileage from him, Schoenberg and his followers were sidestepped because of their association for him with Dr Karl. Casting around through the history of music, trying to find a striking thesis of his own, he came across some rare manuscripts early troubadour music and, amongst them, cryptic references to the doctrine of milleniumists. He saw a potential for a thesis on the secret messages of music, the way in which music had been employed to teach the people at large and spread ideas. This was more than 'The Barber of Seville'! He became quite happy. He went in for short-term sexual relationships and worked out in the gymnasium regularly. But, Carolyn was not quite forgotten. He knew after all, that she was someone special: a woman who could thin' deeply without much talking; v/ho was capable of understanding creative work; who had the power to nurture things of higher value. In a word he missed her while telling himself that he did not and that there were other women as least as beautiful. When the time came that he h to leave to do some research in Vienna, he wrote to her.

It was an email full of contradictions. He wanted to tell her that he admired her and regarded her highly. Yet he was, rightly, suspicious of his motives in doing so. He did not want her to think that he was appealing to her, or telling her that he loved her or wanted her. At the same time, he did not want her to think that he was seeking her attention, tugging at her sleeve for a reassuring smile as a child would from its mother. He wanted to assert himself; to say that he was doing fine, that he did not need her. So, twisted between conscience and a sense of grievance, he scribbled a page and half trying to cover up his confusion by making jokey remarks. It was not difficult for Carolyn to read between the lines; but, what could she say in return?

Dear Reagan,
It was nice you wrote to me, telling me how you are doing, I am happy for you about the news. There are many mysteries in the way music has developed and much useful work to be done to clear things up. It cannot be easy to find a way into this line of work. My best wishes go with you.
I think enough time has gone by for all our silliness to be forgotten. We were just growing up, perhaps. Let us keep the fond memories and forget the arguments. When you are back, call me up and we can meet sometime. And you can tell me about your work.
I am pretty busy. I spend a lot of time on 'musical phenomena' and it is most interesting - though it would be premature to say anything definite about it right now. It is rather to difficult to explain and still at a very early stage. Anyway, it is absolutely right for me and I am sure that I am doing the right thing. Though, obviously being a new field, there is bound to be a bit of strain.
Love, Carolyn. P.S. Take care!

She chided herself for having to close her eyes as she posted the letter, which she believed, was a badly disguised call for help. Why was she so sensitive? she asked herself. The scene with Reagan is finished. But - somebody - help me, hear me!
Her calm was fragile - the calm her acquaintances believed in when she presented them with her implacable manner. She found herself caught between a semi-addiction to the new phenomena and a sense of stultifying isolation at not being to make sense or use of what she discovered. Karl maintained an absolutist demand for her to find out for herself; but, she suspected that he, too, was at a loss and was in fact desperately hoping that she would come up with some means of memory and communication at which he himself had failed.. At times, his sense of secrecy bordered on paranoia. He had excluded everybody else from the experiments and she felt resentful at the burden imposed on her. It was not as if he gave her anything as a human being.
Once, he said to her in passing, 'I tried some of this with my wife once.' It was the first time he had mentioned her. 'What happened?' she asked, cautiously. 'She thought that monsters would come and get her!' Karl grimaced. 'No, to be fairer, it frightened her. Then it was if something in her clamped down. When she refers to my ' experiments' or my" 'music' it is as if it were some hobby I pursue in the basement.'

On hearing this, Carolyn's uppermost thought was of how little sympathy he had for people. It seemed to go with his manipulative facility for tuning people in the incept process (which had now fallen into disuse, since Carolyn no longer needed it and there were no others involved in the work): he understood people only with respect to getting something from them, not for what they were. In a sense of fairness, she reminded herself that Karl had suffered from rejection of his work; it had seemed to make him bitter and, at the same time, almost afraid all the time, especially of the work he was doing. It was easy to see through the facade of didactic certainty he tried to maintain in front of her. She sighed to herself. She had made the bed so she had better lie on it - only, it was turning out to be of Procrustean manufacture.

She dreamed a lot and there were dreams full of images of death.She saw her empty eye-sockets, she felt her month full of ashes; there were endless hordes of people marching past her corpse lying in a darkened room. She also saw alien landscapes under different suns in which the air was permeated with evil. Half-glimpsed creatures drew close to her to peer at her, to examine her like a specimen under the microscope, sometimes cutting her open from between her legs, violating her then from inside, directly into her organs. Once or twice, though, she ran through space with a magnetic wind upon her face, the stars flitting by on either side, the stars ahead verging into the blue and then becoming so spectrally shifted that they became ecstasies of positive darkness. Such dreams lifted her spirit. She wished that she had someone to tell about them. Karl would not be interested.
Something, wrong was happening. She recognised it soon after replying to Reagan's letter; when she saw herself actually wanting Karl to take her in his arms and undress her, do things to her. Almost revolted at herself, she often felt near to tears; and her face became a mask, set in a frame of nonchalance that she did no dare relax. One day, she found herself outside Karl's office and was shocked to realise that she could not remember how she came to be there. By this time, she had her own key; it was inevitable that she went in and took up the apparatus, settling herself down in order to forget whatever it was that was causing her so much pain.

This time, she told herself, this time I will remember! I've done with experiences. I want to know something that I did not know before. Please God! No - fuck God and all the rest of them. I WILL LEARN.
When she came out of it, flushed with the aching wonder that always befell her, the awful emptiness of her memory finally broke her control and she wept. A flood of tears long held back washed over her. She barely noticed Karl entering the room and standing there shocked and helpless. When she looked up at him, she had the strength of despair to yell at him, .'What are you going to do? Why get me into this when you don't know what you are doing? You just stand there and don't care if I go out of my mind. You're a creep! And you treat me like some kind of laboratory animal. You don't tell me how of why you started all this, or what it's for! You're an irresponsible maniac with the feelings of a lump of shit'
'Carolyn, please; it's a strain for both of us. I thought you got so much out of the experience that it would be all right for you.'

'It's not enough!'
'Well, I am not making you go on -'
'Don't try that on! Don't tell me I can just go away and forget all this because I am upset. Look at yourself! You're hardly human! What's happened to you?'
Karl slumped down into a chair. Her effect on him was similar to that on Reagan. Life was fine as long as she was around and did not question anything. But, as soon as she raised difficulties, the fabric of control was torn, the bottom fell out of things, leaving disorder and confusion. Karl wished that he could cry, too. He looked at her: young, beautiful, intense and intelligent and felt his age. And felt a sense of shame at having neglected her so much. All that he could do was to appeal to her. 'Just try to understand that things are very difficult for me. Without you, I think I would have fallen apart long ago. You wonder why I don't make things easier for you. It's because I respect you too much -'
'- and you want to observe what happens to me for the sake of your bloody research! You want to use me to make a name for yourself!'
'What can I say? Of course I want to see what happens to you. I believe something tremendous will come out of you, I don't want to spoil it. It really does have to come from you, independently. It has to be like that. I cannot afford to let this slip one millimetre. I thought you understood.. I'm going through a similar thing myself.'
Carolyn was contemptuous of his explanations, which she had heard so often, but she was honest enough to see the sorry state he was in; the man was going to pieces. Oh! where was that mythical imperviousness of the 'real' man, to emotional turmoil, to be found? Why does she always end up taking control of events? Here was a man of extraordinary gifts brought to a state of flabby ineptitude and she was left carrying the can. Then, she remembered something that had struck her from time to time.
'Dr Karl, let's drop the way we are doing things right now. It has become pointless, We have to: establish something concrete, I have an idea, but it is up to you to make it work. you know the system. What we have got to do is to make a new access together, to the same thing. If we can achieve that, then we can learn how to talk each other about what is going on. By talking together while in the experience, maybe we can come to something,'
Karl lifted a hand as if to dismiss the whole idea, then let it drop. He looked at her again, the mark of the tears still on her face. He took strength from her determination. What better answer to his own unvoiced prayer could he ever hope for? She was the answer, however it was going to come about. 'Well, ' he said, 'we have established why we cannot describe anything of what we perceive after the event - in contrast, say, with drug or electrically induced experiences.'
'Yes. We know that the human context disappears. There is no one to talk to. There is nobody there, only the things. It is as if we were in the things,'
'That's right. So, your suggestion of contacting each other when we are both in the same perception does offer, in theory, a possible way out. What is difficult to see is how we can assume that we can gain access to the same thing. How can we do that without language? And, I am still not sure whether or not my instrumentation gives access to just one coherent plane of reference,'
'Well, we can find out about those things. As for procedure - that's up to you. Try everything - anything. Maybe, time turns out to be so dilated that we will miss each other by nanoseconds. Whatever - it's bound to teach us something. Perhaps one of us can do something in access that the other can verify. There are all sorts of possibilities.'

Karl suddenly looked vague and mumbled, 'Yes, very well. I'll start along these lines tomorrow -'

'No! Dr Karl, you'll start on these things right now. What's got into you? Why do you avoid making real consistent effort directed somewhere? Even though you keep on saying that it is the be-all and. end-all of your existence? Have you ever asked yourself that?'

'Is that what it looks like to you?' He still seemed slightly dazed. 'It is like that. Don't you realise it? Wait! Right now, I feel a sense of oppression lifting, like a cloud dispersing. 7/hat have v/e been doing these last months? Just repeating random incursions with you fiddling with mere details and accumulating data you don't use for anything, We haven't actually done anything!' She got up and went to stand over his slumped figure. 'Karl!' she said in a loud, firm voice. 'Look at me. If you want my help then you have to get a grip on yourself, Maybe someone or something does not want us to do this, we have been behaving Irrationally. It must be possible to progress this work. It is time v/e fought the stupidity in ourselves. Do you understand me?'
'I'll do what you say' he replied, refusing to look her in the eyes,
'That's not enough! ' Feeling foolish but desperate enough to try anything, she flipped open her blouse to show her breasts. 'Look! I'm desirable, right?'
'Yes, indeed, 'he said uncomfortably.
'Yet, you don't do anything about it. You never touch me or show that you want me.'

He protested, 'But, I'm sure you do not want my attentions.'
'Does that matter? Sure, if you felt me up, I'd probably slap your face. But, who ever really knows in advance? In any case, so what?'
'But, what about you and what you feel and want, I can't interfere with that.'
'Never mind about me - you don't, anyway. I'll look after me. Why don't you look after you? Why don't you live your life? Why don't you do what you say you want to do? Look - I'm so desperate about this work that I'd screw you, if it helped. So, what are you prepared to do?'

He raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness. Involuntarily, she stepped back as if he were about to make a grab at her. Karl began -to laugh and she could not help seeing the joke was on her, It had been a long time since they had laughed together. With a slightly flushed face, she did up her blouse and took a seat herself. Recovering, she said, 'Another thing. You should consider some other site for this work. What if there is interference? I am quite serious about what I have said. Something has been turning us into idiots. It might even be coming from the access itself. Is there anyone who might want to stop you? Who knows about this? You've hinted enough about other people following the same lines.'
'It's hard not to be paranoid. But, I think you are right and , also it is my belief that the interference is coming from outside - it's not just a by-product of the process. I know only that there is a small division in a company called INSTRAM, which is on to this. Oh, yes - I did show you the various pieces from which I inferred it, but didn't explain. I gather that INSTRAM have an information patent connected with a certain instrumentation and have secured a five year period of exclusive development through the IT development ministry. In other words, they are shutting other people out. God knows what they really have. But, I fear that if they fine out what I am doing, I'll be closed down. The health department comes into this , as well. You know - no unauthorised tampering with the human nervous system. So it goes on. The whole thing is obviously a web of monopolistic control. I don't want to wait for the privilege of paying a subscription to an access controlled by other people. How, just maybe, they can find out that somebody is doing something in this area through the access means itself. And we do know that the process has an effect on the brain. The two could be connected. '
'You know,' he added. 'Maybe you have something there,' and he smiled casting a glance towards what could still be seen of her breasts. 'Perhaps sex can provide a shielding. '

'We won't put that to the test right now, ' she said uncomfortably.

Karl chuckled and she realised that both their spirits had lifted simply from playing with the thought of it. Then she frowned and admonished him, 'So, you've had at the back of your mind a possible threat from these people. And you didn't tell me!'
'But it's only the vaguest speculation. So far, we have nothing to go on.'
'Let's start by believing in ourselves! If we have been getting nowhere, then there is a reason for that.'
'Perhaps we are just scared of what we will find?'
'No! I am not scared, at least. All the way I have told you that the new access is something joyful for me. It's just the awful feeling of loss afterwards; not being able to remember. After a session, when I hear any ordinary sound, it makes me feel almost sick. I hear that I am not hearing; as if I was dead. I tell myself - this can't be all there is. Ordinary sounds are revolting.' She shuddered. 'Only music helps.'
Carolyn's suggestion that they move site nagged at him. It brought into focus that fact of his limited resources. He was held to his present technology by his dependency on his idiosyncratic method of inception. He had not the least notion of how to automate that part of the process; and, without automation, he could not break into a purely objective mode of research. Farley' reaction had showed him how weak his position was: he must appear to any sceptic as an eccentric musician or producer of hallucinations. INSTRAM must have some kind of total automation. Most importantly, they must have developed a means of recording observations.
As far as he knew or could guess, the basic framework of space-time remained pretty constant. Far distances remained far distant. Information generated at one point had to be transmitted by a carrier to another point. If there were direct interference from INSTRAM it would require an energy beam, or the implantation of a device. He and Carolyn spent two weeks dismantling and re-assembling the set-up, checking it out and making new configurations. It boosted their morale; but, Karl explained, 'There could be an effect at the level of new access which operates in a non-localised way. In other words, information at one point is instantaneously correlated with information at another point. They could be finding out what we are doing and, by 'locking-in' in some way, affecting our reality.'

'Would that mean that their instrument is somehow precisely resonant with ours?'
'More than that. That would be a problem for them. There would have to be some way in which their instrument and ours were 'generated' from the same event - rather like the supposed sympathy between identical twins; what happens to one happens to the other. I've even read stories of one twin hurting the other by inflicting damage on himself, out of spite or insanity.'
'I think it is important then that you tell me how your instruments came about. In that way -' Her eyes narrowed as she saw blank bewilderment spread through him, an air of distraction, as if the question were totally meaningless. She had seen it before. He was incapable of thinking about what had happened in making the discovery. She told him firmly, 'Dr Karl, according to what you have told me it is vitally important that you remember bow the instrumentation came into being. ''Yes,' he said and then completely blank. He began wandering about in a vague, inconsequential way and then began talking about his lack of resources and the problem of relocation. He had all the symptoms of advanced senility.

'Dr Karl! I'm asking you a question!'

'Yes, I know. We'll go into it some time. Right now, what is important is what we are going to do, not what we might have done. '
'No. No. No. Listen to me,' she was becoming frantic. 'I'm going to write the question down. Here' She thrust the paper in front of him. 'For my sake, look at the question and say something about it or write something. I'll be back in five minutes to hear what you have ' say or read 'what you have written. ' She had to get out of the room itself and away from him, just for a while, to take a breath again, to overcome the sense of numbness that was creeping into her brain. It frightened her that he was totally unaware of what was happening with him. The man was totally schizoid. Outside the room, her head seemed to clear and a thought struck her. What did it matter if her impulse was crazy? Go the whole way including the vid. She knew Dr Karl had one and where it was kept. She prayed that it was charged.
Coming back into room, she saw Karl had incepted and was regarding something with fixed attention. In haste, she dug out the vid and checked it out. Taking an unprecedented step, she cut power to the apparatus. His head shot back and he looked around him wildly.
'Don't ever do that!' he shouted at her.
'We've got a crisis. It's one we have been in all along but haven't recognised. I want you to know about it as well as myself. It may no be long before I go under, like you. '
'What are you talking about?'
'Karl,' she said, not even ashamed at using a seductive voice, desperate to get his attention and interest. 'You know you trust me. Go along with me, will you? Do as I say?'
'Why be so mysterious? Can't you just say it, plainly?'
'No, I can't. A demonstration is worth more than words. Now, I am got to write a question on a piece of paper. Then, I'm going to give it to you and ask you to write an answer. Whatever happens is going to be recorded on the vid and then we are going to watch the play-back together and work out what it means.'

She could see that he was irritated by the prospect of this elaborate performance; but the sight of the crumpled sheet lying on the floor bolstered her resolve. The basic issue was whether he was still rational or not. All the talk of external influences or effects may turn out to be no more than a smoke screen for a defective - and. infective - mentality.

'Just remember the principle of objective reality, Dr Karl. Trust me. It's all just facts. Things that actually happen.'

She wrote the question and. vied it. Karl received the paper and she stepped back to vie it in his hand. He peered at it with a puzzled frown. 'Is this it?' he enquired. She spoke to him slowly and clearly. 'Dr Karl, I ask you to read the question aloud and then give me an answer.' He frowned again. 'This isn't a question. It's a kind of vague speculation about the nature of time. I don't understand what you want me to do.'

'Dr Karl, it is not a vague speculation about time. It is a question addressed to you in plain English. Please read it and give me an answer. ' Vagueness and distraction scrambled his features almost unrecognizably. He jumped into another fragment of his personality. 'Why do you want to know this? What do you want to get out of this? Whose that recording for?' Suspicion was almost choking him.

'Dr Karl. This is Carolyn. You have to trust me. Just humour me. Whatever you say will be kept between us, I promise. Do you want me to ask you the question out loud?'

'Surely, Ask me anything you like. Let's forget this nonsense.' Then he crumpled the piece of paper and threw it towards the disposal, turning towards her with a sickle smile on his face. Carolyn vied the paper being crumpled and, thrown, then she vied the man in close-up, registering the distortions that went across his face. She said, 'You have thrown away the piece of paper with my question on it. Why did you do that?'

'Was that the question? I thought it was just a piece of paper. I was thinking about what you were going to ask me.' Now, he was smirking in an horribly ingratiating way. Carolyn had to take a grip_ on herself. It was like viewing a parade of false humanity, the empty multitude of the persona, an ersatz being. She doubted that Karl would ever recover from this, or be for her again.
'Have you forgotten that my question was written on that piece of paer and. you were going to answer it?'

'I thought you were going to ask the question yourself. What has the paper to do with it?' The vid-cam v/as shaking in her hands and she tried to still them as she asked, 'How did you come to invent the instrumentation of new access?'. She saw, amazed, that he was fast asleep! Then he blinked, gave a start, saw her, frowned and whispered her name. 'Dr Karl, I asked you a question. What is your answer?'

'I'm sorry. What was that? Some other time, perhaps, when we are no quite as busy. We can discuss all that then.'
'That is not good enough. It will not do.', her voice choked. 'I have to tell you that I have evidence in this vid that you are insane,'
He stared at her wildly, his mouth agape. 'What are you saying?'
What are you doing to me?' he cried.
'We are finding out what is actually happening to you. All I have done is to make a record of your behaviour over the last ten minutes Are you prepared to view it?'
'If you want me to; of course. But I sincerely hope that it is something that helps the project. Are you a traitor, too? Are you rejecting my work?'
'Dr Karl. This may be the salvation of the project.' But, she told herself, it must be the end. With trembling fingers, she took out the cartridge and plugged it into the monitor on the desk. She arranged a chair for him and tapped in instructions to run the last piece of recording. It seemed to her that everything of value was gone. Maybe it was in a spirit of revenge that she wanted him to confront his madness. At that moment, she hated him - out of fear or out of the months of resentment bottled up inside her. But, she also pitied him and, much to her disgust, she pitied herself. She spoke to him, 'Just think of what has happened in the last ten minutes. Try to remember what happened just as it happened.'
'Well, you were -'
'Don't bother to tell me about it; just get it straight in your own mind. Now, I'm going to switch on.' She stood behind him as the sequence unfolded, wondering what to do if he turned away. She could hardly look at him or bring herself to stand so near to him. When it was over, she reached over his shoulder and turned the monitor off. The screen darkened, She forced herself to walk round an face him. He was crying. They were tears of fear. He reached for her and buried his face in her belly, shaking and trembling.

A voice rang across the room, 'What's happening?' An elderly man was just inside the room.
'Who the hell are you?' Carolyn shouted. 'Get out of here. This is none of your business. You have no right to be here!' But, the man advanced into the room and said, 'On the contrary. I fear that this is my business and may be largely my doing, or because of what I did not do.'
Karl looked up and gasped. 'Farley! ' Then he looked at Carolyn. 'Did you bring him into this? Have you two set this up?'
'I've never seen him in my life before!'
Farley came over to the desk and arched an eyebrow of interrogation. 'Tell me briefly what has happened. How did he get into this state?'
'It is absolutely none of your business and you've no right to be here. This is between Dr Karl and myself.'
'No. I am afraid that I will not leave. I have information you need. It's time for me to put you into the picture Ms. Moore. Let me put it to you: you cannot afford to reject the possibility that I have information relevant to your problems. And let me reassure you that I have no connection with the administration here. I am an old friend of Karl's and I have been involved in the events over the last few months, even though neither of you were aware of this. In any case, I would not leave now because Karl is obviously in need of help. I can help him. And who else have you to turn to?'

She sat down. Farley was gratified that she was trying to reason it out; but he felt the intensity of her gaze when it was turned on him end he was aware of both her strength and how near she was to breaking point. 'Are you for real?' she challenged.
'Yes, I am,' he said. She seemed to come to a decision, 'Then I'll tell you this much, Dr Keri is in trauma. He seems to have been avoiding certain areas of his past experience. I brought things to a head. Perhaps, I have pushed him over the edge. What I did is in the vied - look at it if you like. Are you some kind of psychologist?'
'Not as such. My profession is in the area of thinking. In my view, normal thinking is an aberration. But, let me look at this vied. Is it in here? I'll turn it round so that he doesn't have to look at it again.'
'Farley! ' Karl croaked, 'I thought you were my friend. Why did you deny me?'
'I haven't denied you - only your interpretations. Keep quiet now,' he commanded.
With Farley in the room, Carolyn felt a sense of relief. She was no longer alone. Something might be done and Karl might be saved. More importantly, the new world awaited her - and that could be saved as well. Feeling dizzy and drained, she wandered off to look out of the window, drawing up the blind, which usually obscured the view of the lawns sweeping down to the transit rail. She wondered where Reagan was and what he would, nave thought of the scene had he been there. Time seemed to stand still. She was gazing out when Farley came up behind her and said, softly, 'Ms. Moore, I have to congratulate you. What you did was remarkable. It will be for his own benefit. I know you value the truth in him - so do I. Do not be afraid. It's time for you to take care of yourself. We need you well end strong for the next step. Right now, I'm taking Karl away for a few days; I want you to do something. Ring his wife and tell her that I've taken him off to an important conference in Paris. It was all totally unexpected and you do not know any details.'

'But, what will she think? I've never spoken to her before!'
'She will think what I want her to think. Now, you must go away yourself. Is there anywhere you can go, preferably out of the country? Is there someone you can see - a close friend, perhaps?' She thought immediately of Vienna, but could not see how she could face Reagan. He looked at her searchingly. 'I see the sort of thing you have in mind. That's good - just the right thing for you. Have confidence in yourself. Don't worry about yourself in relationships. You'll always resolve them very well.' 'I know,' she said, sadly, 'but why do I always have to work them out? Why can't they just happen?'
'They do just happen, but in the way that suits you. Think about it. Something good always comes out of you.' he pressed her shoulder. 'Take care of yourself. Do you need extra money for the trip?'
'I'll manage somehow.'
'I want you to go by shuttle and leave by this evening. I insist you make use of this. Have no qualms about it. ' He brought out a sub-credit card and held it out for her to sign. Then he laid over it his own magnetic signature.

'What are you going to do with Dr Karl?' she asked. 'Find him and bring him back.'
She went over to Karl who was slumped exhausted An the chair and knelt besides him. 'Are you alright? she asked. 'Do you forgive me?'
' Obviously, I am not alright' he said grinning up at her. 'But, what about the truth-loving lady who tried to sort me out? Are you alright?' She embraced him. 'I trust your Mr. Farley. I don't know why. We will succeed, won't we? We'll get there?' She half expected him to say: if you say so. But, he didn't. He just looked at her and that gave her greater hope than any words.

Meeting Reagan in Vienna was an expected pleasure. She found that their brief affair was easy to handle and had no sense of superiority in the face of his evident confusion. With deft maneuvers, she extracted him from his current girl-friend and spent delightful nights in his rooms. They even managed a few concerts. She was deeply moved when he bought tickets for a performance that included Webern's last Cantata. After wards, he took her to the spot where he had been shot by some moronic American and spent the night discussing what might have happened to western music if he had lived for another decade. Too tired to make love, they watched the dawn come up and. fell into peaceful oblivion. She found it easy to avoid all reference to Dr Karl. The streets were vibrantly alive the people seemed ecstatic to her. The Autumnal sky was clear and. the leaves were golden in the parks and along the roads. She had not felt happier in her life and wondered why she was not worrying about Karl. It was not that she trusted Farley after all. Finally, she decided that when she was happy, she thought more clearly and saw the uselessness of worry.

From time to time she would look at Reagan and wonder about having children with him. It was good to feel like a woman again; to let all that take over without, of course, an abysmal descent into emotional disorder. What kind of a. woman was she? She laughed at the reflection of her body in the mirror, admiring her breasts and legs and told herself that she was her own kind of woman.

The message arrived on the sixth day. Reagan had begun to wonder what her situation was and what he should do about it. The timing was perfect. It read: 'We start phase two soon. Are you still interested in dyadic access?' It was signed; Karl Farley. She felt herself at the start of a new adventure. She told Reagan that she might come over from time to time but that she was going to be very busy for a. while; and left him to pick up the threads of his studies and interrupted liaisons. When they parted, she liked what he said: 'You are the best lady I could ever hope to know. And I hardly begin to know you. I wish you well in what you do, I do wish you well. It's difficult for me to see you go, but I know that I can't keep you'.
She told him to give the other girls a break and produce some good ideas. On the shuttle, her mind turned with ease to the problem of dyadic access. She thought of the lines from Eliot; 'And the unseen eyebeam crossed, For the roses had the look of flowers that are looked at.' A chill went through her.

Translated along the walkway in a tube of impersonal, a-historical conduction, her eyes flickered automatically at the garish official? propaganda, mingling seduction with warning. The intelligible seemed a universe away: the background music vapid and insidious, the visuals strident, motion neutralized by automation. People lived in puerile models of reality, handed down from a forgotten race; rays went out from their eyes and ears to create a mirage of a world, their mouths giving egression to emptiness. Discovery had gone so fast and been so effectively exploited that discovery itself had been buried in artefacts. The world was without content, an echo-chamber of hypotheses grown habitual; breeding the same in escalation.

Her eyes seemed to blaze with an energy of their own; she felt she wanted to sing in defiance and actually managed to softly hum a tune and its transpositions. In eager haste, she rushed into the control sector, her limbs repossessed and almost danced on the spot during the delays of the security checks. Walking down the green corridor towards the phone booths, she was deftly accosted by a woman whose smiling face did not hide the fact of her official status. Carolyn was asked politely to step inside a nearby cubical. In irritation and apprehension, she complied. It was some minutes before she registered through the smoke-screen of politeness that she had been randomly selected as part of a medical screening experiment the European authorities were trying. It was easier to go along with the request for voluntary submission to a scan than refuse - which she was legally entitled to do - in case her refusal drew even more attention to herself. It took only minutes end, at; least, gave her the reassurance right away that Reagan had been checking his partners out and had not contracted any of the new viral infections.

There were no messages for her at the desk and there was nothing for her in the com she dialed in Karl's office. Taken aback, she realized that she had no direct access to Farley and would be embarrassed to phone Karl's home at this late hour. She hovered about in a vagueness of indecision until she thought of her own com. Keying in the right combination, she scanned the memory and picked up an audio-only message from Karl. 'Ms. Moore. Your study assignment is to appraise yourself of three H philosophy and, for the moment, to suspend practical engagements.' That was all. She also found a weird visual from Reagan, but could not make sense of it without an assembler.

The shuttle terminal was interlocked with the monorail which would deliver her within five miles of her living space. As she was fed into the platform her thoughts revolved around the incident in the terminal building. There was no escaping the fact that data on her and her travels was now reinforced in the memory banks, linked with Farley and - she suddenly wondered, possibly with Reagan since the scan might have been sensitive enough to identify his DNA?, Such data could be accessed by the authorities or vested interests -no privacy defense ever worked completely. She was becoming infected by the growingly clandestine character of the .project and the sense of paranoia which had crept into her in the last week, before Karl's breakdown came back strongly. The message from him war ridiculously obscure - she was sure that 3H did not designate any standard course unit. Maybe, there was something in Dr Karl's files but she had left her key with Farley before she left.

Reasoning that Karl would not be unnecessarily involving her in cryptograms - which she did not have the mind for, anyway, as well he knew - she concluded that the reference must be, in spite of appearances, perfectly straightforward. Given that the message was designed for her, it should be easy to find its meaning. She had no technical knowledge of philosophy, only a vague knowledge of its history from the time she had waded through that out-dated volume by Russell out of curiosity during one vacation. She tried to remember the books on Dr Karl's shelves. There were a lot of German authors. She could not remember anything by Kant, but the eidetic form of a metre of Hegel's writings came to her. She had browsed through something with a title like 'The Science of Nature' once, while waiting for him to turn up for one of the tutorials, None of it had appealed to her; but, that was in another life-time and with respect to another mind. Now, nothing would interest her more than to study the science of nature. Was there a hint in the message that philosophers, like musicians, had formed a new quasi-organ of perception giving e new basis of reality? Her perception of the scope of philosophy was somewhat hazy but, at least, she knew that Dr Karl had eschewed the use of Eastern philosophies and systems and restricted himself to the European tradition. He once said to her, when she protested on principle to his 'parochial' attitude, 'They may have it more right than the westerners - but. that does not help. We have to find it out for ourselves the hard way.' and he had left it at that.

There was a famous philosopher - whoever he was - who had summed up the western tradition as: Plato-Aristotle - Plato. Now, she thought, it is Aristotle's turn again; a return to a more 'empirical' approach and away from idealized laws. Somewhere in the helical twists of conception and its analysis there was a useful genetic pattern that had never developed into a complete species.
Her mind was suspended in the space of the hum of the induction motors and she hardly noticed the city sparkling with the illumination deriving from the orbiting solar mirrors. Usually, it was entrancing. to her and lifted her out into the night and above the atmosphere to the ingenious footholds suspended in equipotential regions by which mankind was able to poke its nose into the corners of the solar system. On this night, she was a time traveler over the ravages of the world. and indulged in images of lone intelligence crawling through the concrete of their skulls to the womb of creation. The world out there had become a. business affair; had grown cold from lack of embraces.

Emerging onto the monorail platform, she descended the escalator to the infra-city transit booths and dialed her name and co-ordinates. One of the cruising cars would incorporate her in its route through the central computer. The screen showed her a probable wait of twenty minutes. She sat on one of the benches, ignoring the attentive glances of the security guard. There were only two other people waiting there, looking unhealthy under the blue tone of the ambient lighting. The same kind of vapid sound patterns wandered on, deadening her spirits until she regained her concentration. All she could recall of Hegel was some weird description of volcanoes. Thinking of the German idealists, she was carried by her associations to the existentialists and then to the currently famous 'Dialogues-of Non-Speculation' put out by the Scandinavian group following the lead of a systems engineer (which had infuriated her when she heard parts in a vid-documentary).

'So', she told herself, 'Maybe Hegel is one of the three H's and that leaves me to find two others. ' When the arrival bell sounded, she got to her feet and, allowing the guard a friendly but neutral smile, checked through the gate. Inside the car, there were only five people, sat dumbly under the surveillance of the interior vid. She sat at the back and signaled for the route display. The journey would not be too long - this time, she would not have to sit there while the car followed some bizarre 'optimum' route all over the city.

It was drizzling and the passing streets merged into the semblance of a decorative wall. The TV was showing news from some distant planet as if it were a random interference in the event of nothing actually happening that mattered. She was dozing off as she vaguely remembered how fanciful Hegel's account of science was. At. her drop point, the display flashed her code. Once alighted, she used the comunit to contact her flat console and announce her imminent arrival -failure to arrive would be notified to the local security patrols. Once there, she made for the console and identified herself. Then she ran through Dr Karl's message. Still puzzled, she put the message from Reagan through the assembler and confirmed her suspicions: it was very graphic and delightfully obscene; maybe they would try it together one day. Perhaps.

In the following days, she spent most of her time at the library, gaining a headache and progressing very slowly. There were relatively few H philosophers but she could not find the thread that would connect three of them to each other - and to herself. Take David Hume, for example; he was obviously concerned with direct perception as well as with social morality; but, what would be have to do with Hegel? It was not until she came across a relatively minor work of Heidegger called 'What is a Thing?' that something clicked. The book itself was quite a revelation. She acquired a passion for it that took her by surprise. For a time, she struggled with the doubt she had: that the approach was a retreat from science into psychologism; but more was at work than a categorization of beliefs and , at last, she found the attraction of a deeper kind of objectivity then she had entertained before. The trail from Heidegger led back to Husserl. Delving into his books, she found herself from time to time becoming completely clear about some deep issue and then, in a moment of further reading or association, losing it all and realizing that she could not even summarize what she had read.

She recognized the similarities.

It was a great surprise when she found a message from Dr Karl in her console. 'Congratulations on the objective character of your research,- Take up practical work;: when you are ready.' Obviously, he had access to the library computer; but, where the hell was he and what was he doing? Carolyn felt angry at the prospect of being left out of the key experiment which she herself had proposed. What if Farley and Karl were doing the experiment together? Was she being left behind to study philosophy? These thoughts gnawed at her for days and her studies suffered. It was not until she happened to be listening to some Bach fugues that the fog lifted That inexorable sense of unceasing pattern - which, sometimes, had irritated her to the point of fury, making her look perverse in the eyes of others - made her see that Bach was fused into his perceptions: his genius was a supreme failure of being; be had been so effective that he was imprisoned. Hence, she saw his music as a kind of prison. Her destiny was where 'falls the shadow'.

She heard her own will. At that moment, she remembered. This was access. The intoxication of it buoyed her up for days but, at the end, left her empty and deflated. She scribbled cryptic and disorganized thoughts such as; 'will is the future; memory the past access the present' and 'will and memory contradict each other, otherwise we would be sane' and 'the man in me refuses to fuck reality'. Then, she was seized by the idea that the truth of the new access was in change. The old access was reified as objects whose ultimate claim to being was as the existence of a thing.

The new access was not to a new set of entities as another genus of things nestling within and amongst the things of old -but to the transitions whereby, it had been imagined, the objects of the world were woven together. There had been the discovery of particles of thingness and then of particles of force; but this had only served to multiply the mysteries of transition. And, she felt, change was the subject. Truly, consciousness constitutes the world. Her thinking had to give way to a different order of reality. From the spinning vortex somewhere located in the moment of her seizure, violent threads span themselves out everywhere and, it seemed, all the possibilities were co-present without exclusion. Every scrap of half-remembered and hardly digested information on physics, psychology, phenomenology and every frustration and impasse of conception and music, psycholinguistics, poetry and sexuality, the world information problem, the origin of life and -

So, her mind became confused and burdened with multiplications and there came back into her mind the relentless affirmation of the fugues. Then, she knew that she must compose or die as something useless. And the fragments of the mental explosion fell down into the gravity well of the instruments. She was ready for practical studies. A message left in her console for Karl to trigger resulted in her receiving an access disc to his office within two days. She left another message for him to pick up: 'Have volunteered for the front line. Send you a postcard. Intelligence back up would be nice.'

She spent two days re-familiarising herself with the apparatus. It seemed not to have been used since she had left and there was no new data in the computer files. It made the set-up almost virginal. But, for the first time, she began to wonder how it was that nothing had malfunctioned. Though she had seen Dr Karl fiddling with the equipment, she had never seen him encounter an evident breakdown and deal with it. She wondered whether he would be capable of dealing with it, even. But, had he not constructed it?

To her surprise, she received a long letter from Farley - an actual written message - really, more an essay than a personal communication. 'Is the idea abstract or concrete? By which, it is usually represented, dense or tenuous. Hume's assumption was that idea -since it is derived from experience - must always be less than the experience. In other words, he saw the idea as a mere generality and, the more general, or universal, the more tenuous in substance it is - until we reach the grand conception of Being, say, which must be totally empty, a sort of asymptotic limit to all experience. Some mediaevalists of genius, suspicious of this tenuous representation of the universal, made a special case for the singular, the individual. They even went so far as to consider it far divorced from abstractive generality: in fact, it was taken as the very converse, more deeply concrete and existent than any appearance could ever be. In modern science, there have always been the two strands interwoven, the one of singularity being treated as the poor sister, lacking the social wealth of the universal but intensely seductive, to be enjoyed in alleys and motel rooms with the blinds drawn, so-to-speak, rather than joined in marriage. Physics plunged ahead with the universal but avoided the question as to how the universal appears in the particular. Instead, it split into two: one part we can represent by relativity and the other by quantum theory. It was left to the latter to generate singularity - already implicit in the quanta itself - whereas relativity was intended as and was pure generality. Hiding in the wings, the dark sister of thermodynamics bided her time to gatecrash the ball and announce t that she was pregnant with a new science that was the rightful heir of the estate.

'Organised complexity was a crude name for the new bastard; but, of course, organization carried the universal and complexity the singular. It was no wonder that a few turned back to our early mediaeval friends - Jews and Arabs, as well as their more tardy Christian colleagues of the tenth to the twelfth centuries and other renegades down to Leibnitz - and tried to upset the contemporary establishment by talk of the different substances of the universal and the particular; substance being a word long scorned in an era of particles, fields and space-time. With the view that substance combined the objective and the subjective, all seemed set for a heretical quantum theory based on aesthetics that had been, traditionally, the mental space in which the objective and the subjective could cohere (outside the vagaries of questionable occultism). Arab scientists liked to quote the Quran - Only by Power will you overcome the Company of the Djin'. The Djin were the energies of the world that dealt out the dynamic mosaic of concreteness, appearing as Nature both active and passive, revealing and hiding herself by the self-same power, that power which found an echo in human technology.

'The matter-force-mind notion of the holistic physicists found little favour. Hume's down to earth psychology - after all, just a hand-me-down from the same scholastics with their intellect scanning the diversity of data to elicit the forms revealing their sameness in the stuff of intellect itself - was too entrench ink the West and it was to take a long time before the esoteric technology of synchrotrons and the like would become a natural way of seeing for those who would not themselves engineer such monumental events. When information is divorced from the doing of it, it appears as magic. The world acquired a new magic - and also a new mythology. It was, perhaps, a problem of education. People at large helped themselves that they experienced reality through their senses and failed to experience the action of ideas. As long as ideas were not perceived, the way of science continued to be a mystery and wrapped in myths. The man in the street must always fail to grasp how such thin things as ideas could be at the base of the thick things that they lived by. . In some ways, thi