Rytius Records (Substack Edition), Ch. 21

Chapter 21. Public

21. Public

Rytius arrived 90 minutes before the allotted time and posted up on the roof of the apartment complex opposite New Ark Center, from which he could observe the councilors and citizens as they walked past the Hall of Truth, the main space of what was formerly a multipurpose exhibition center, and into the Theater of Victory. The apartment building used to be a hotel, which meant that a sort of servile subterfuge was built into its form, an entire complex of service stairs and elevators hidden and made precisely inconvenient for residents.

There were 8 councilors for the governance of New Ark, and they did not meet regularly, because they did not need to. Most were sycophants, and their portfolios rarely required actual competence, as they were politically minded delegators of genuine tasks to properly constrained underlings. Treasure, Construction, Water, Power, Food, Trade, Law, and War. War Councilor Saberman Hawkins (the once-famed defector from New York, where he had served as Worrus Fish’s Undersecretary of Defense) entered with Law Councilor Justice Boniface, and that was nothing out of the ordinary. Amfibean Brady, the engineer charged with Power, was the only other serious person—a legitimate scientist and inventor, who had attended several games in years past—but his competence served him only in the field or laboratory. Rytius watched them as they entered the hall, in their trains of advisers, bodyguards, and minders, hoping to discern either strange combination or schism, but he did not.

He waited there on the roof until the prince arrived. He had identified no surveillance to have countered. Upon crossing the street, he greeted some of the citizen stragglers entering the hall, and strode forth just as he was beckoned to do so, appearing to move at a moment’s command. This greatly pleased the council and the prince.

“Play your game,” Councilor Justice Boniface encouraged him.

Rytius walked to the center of the floor, facing the audience, backed by the councilors, who were also elevated.

He still had no idea what to say. He reminded himself to talk loud.

“ ‘It’s a tough nut to crack.’ No, no, that won’t work. How about, ‘it’s a tough knot to untie.’ That hardly rolls off the tongue slippingly,” he mugged, mock-slipping while pacing back and forth across the floor. “OK, one more attempt; how about ‘it’s a tough knot to slip.’ That’s good, right? I got the noose in and everything. It works, right? Good?” Rytius genuinely asked the audience for an answer. He got a hesitant, mumbled assent.

“OK, nice. I’m glad you agree. But you have some sort of idea of what good is after only two cases?” Rytius asked. The silence he required fell immediately. That’s when he knew that he could play well with those gathered.

“All we had was a nut and a knot,” he said, still pacing, and looking sternly at the listeners in the front row, before stopping and throwing his hands up to say, “Look, if it’s alright with you, it’s alright with me!” Rytius paused while they laughed.

“I didn’t want to tell you all yet, but, er…” He paused again and the laughter built in anticipation. “I know all about nuts and knots,” he winked. “Believe me.” Rytius then performed an exquisite pantomime of autoerotic asphyxiation in which it was clear that the entire scene was an act of self-pleasure, and yet in which no particular motion or gesture appeared vulgar or lewd. As Rytius approached his fatal climax, an old man literally died in the aisle, and his people dragged him out, laughing. “OK, so you see that it doesn’t take much to start playing. But that’s damn near nothing. Nuts and knots. Both are essentially hollow. I mean, when we speak about them in anything other than a literal or a sexual sense, we mean that hollow, empty thing. It’s either going to be empty because you need what’s in it or it’s going to be empty because you need to get out of it. But it’s going to be empty. It’s existence is a trip to nothing. It’s a cipher. It’s pure, evanescent form. Is it actually nothing?” Rytius paused and walked to the other end of the floor.

“ ‘How can you just play like that, from nothing?’ ” Rytius growled in a raspy voice. He paused and continued in his normal voice. “That’s what this trumpeter from the olden days asked a younger piano player he was working with, because he was impressed at his improvisation. It wouldn’t be long before a whole lot of people were, because he became widely known for being able to spontaneously compose entire musical structures on stage by himself on piano, in multiple styles and idioms. Others would transcribe his creations to later confirm his fidelity to the forms he played. Anyway, the young piano player’s answer was, ‘I just do it.’

“That’s saying something. Let’s not dismiss it as the arrogance of youth, but let’s take it seriously. Let’s run a little thought experiment in putting new wine into old bottles. I would take his answer, made in the twentieth century, and I say it in a spirit they didn’t have back then. I’ll say it like Fila would say it. Some of you were there yesterday, at his baby girl’s naming. You’ll remember what I’m talking about, and you’ll know why I am saying it, and then I will explain to everyone how a new nut…I mean a new wine can fill an old sack. I’ll explain it, because I don’t want to fall into a trap I see set before me. Let me tell you what that trap is.”

A murmur spread throughout the hall.

“We recordkeepers refer to ourselves as recordkeepers, and we have a relationship to ourselves such that we have never come to an agreement about what we’re doing with our time. This means we have a conflicted relationship to ourselves, and at least two parts. The concrete fact is that there are two parts. My part believes it is the strongest and the best because we have discussed it among ourselves, I say, among those who think like ourselves, and we, those who think like us, have agreed upon a certain approach to our work. We preserve and document the past, and we spend our time investigating what the past was for those who lived it. We want to know the shape of their lives, the meaning they drew from their lives. The facts are important, but they are not the thing. We seek a higher-order knowledge of the shapes of relationships. Because if we know the shapes of the olden relationships, we can more easily see the shapes of our own. And then, and only then, can we use the facts, the details, for ourselves. Otherwise, we wouldn’t know where to put them.

“It should be easier to relate to the past, but I don’t need to tell you…  We are children of oblivion, taking shelter amidst the wreckage of a continuity lost in an apocalypse we don’t understand.

“And so we can’t agree with those who don’t think like us. They believe that they can trick the past into revealing the cause of the apocalypse. They confront the past as though it can be known directly, by asking it to disprove assertions, one at a time. It sounds elegant, like the scientific method, or a Socratic dialogue,” Rytius paused and glanced briefly at the Councilor Justice. “Or a prosecutor’s cross-examination. Each single assertion pulls in all the records relating to the assertion, and that sounds comprehensive, but by doing that it aligns those records to itself, ignoring their own inherent arrangement, let alone their relationships to records outside the scope of the assertion. Their work is negative, and while they pretend to eventually be able to derive positive knowledge from all this, in the meantime all they’re doing is constructing a prism of exclusions, each one a new facet, making their view of the past that much more fractured and kaleidoscopic.

“They call themselves Speculative Historians. That’s fine. If I had to state our differences plainly, with appropriate rancor on each side, I’d say we seek first ourselves to flourish, and they seek first our pasts to prune, as a precondition of flourishing. We are opposites, united in the same activity of research, debate, discussion, discovery, rediscovery, and I will credit them with the pursuit of knowledge.

“But what regulates our opposition? We haven’t had debates on these matters in ten years, since 2133 when Fila Green and Tellem Ralph, the first two recordkeepers, split over the Lancet.” Rytius paused to seek out their faces among the crowd. Tellem wore a benign smile and looked off into the distance, while Fila met his eyes, listening intently. “We clearly don’t regulate it ourselves. We can’t even agree to hold a debate to disagree. It’s pretty sad, considering the stakes and the talent going to waste.”

Some of the Speculative Historians muttered disapproval. Rytius understood. “Both sides believe the other to be wasting its talent and opportunity.”

Rytius paused and walked over to the side of the stage, where he had lain his pack. He withdrew a wooden folding easel and a large pad of paper, and he spent several seconds setting them up in the center of the stage. The councilors could not see the paper.

“So, what regulates bodies united in opposition? If you were to poach an egg the whirlpool way, cracking the shell and dropping the egg into the vortex of a swirling bath of near-boiling water, you could see that the yolk and the white are held together by centripetal force, the force pulling inward in axial rotation. The medium and agent of that force is the hot swirling water bath itself. But it’s not so obvious that there are two separate things going on at the same time.”

He paused to draw it out.

Rytius sighed. “I sure could use a hot, swirling water bath myself right about now,” Rytius said, turning to look directly up at Councilor Justice Boniface, whereupon he danced toward her, lightly gyrating like a bachelorette party stripper, and pretended to seductively sponge-bathe himself through his body armor and leather coveralls—of which one strap was now unbuttoned and swinging to and fro—and his sweater and thermals. “Mm hmm,” he moaned loudly.

Attendees wooed their disbelief and shock and fear.

She frowned and smiled at the same time, so Rytius turned back around to face the crowd, to waggle his eyebrows for a quick bit of comic relief. He turned back to her. “You can arrest me any old time you like,” he said suggestively, presenting his arms for binding. “Do you, too, also like nuts and knots, as well?” There were more giggles and oohs. She smiled contemptuously and narrowed her eyes, as though to indicate that she had been a good sport but that gametime was now over. Rytius agreed, and turned back to face the public.

“But you know we’ve been in hot water,” he said confidentially. There was no doubt that it was true, and those gathered vocalized their plain agreement.

Rytius paused and let his head fall back in exasperation, and then he let a deep sigh buzz his lips in exhalation. “These God damned princes,” he moaned long and slow, dragging out the “-ces”, as he turned around slowly to end his sibilation and rotation with gaze affixed on Feelharmonica, who neither squirmed nor bristled, though he shot Councilor Boniface a quick glance. Rytius tested Feelharmonica once more: “What? What?” He bucked up his chest and bounced around like a man pretending to prepare to fight. “If you’re feeling froggy, jump!” Rytius froze in the stupidest threatful pose he could muster and looked menacingly at the prince with whom he had hunted pigeons and played tag long ago. He held it, and he held the prince’s gaze until Feelharmonica cracked a crooked half-smile, and everyone laughed, and Rytius could go on, frog in hot water.

“Yes, the birth pangs of the Covenant of New Ark, the death throes of Prince Appall, the trilateral sibling rivalry we’ve got going on here, right, Feelharmonica? Mercs, taxes, shortages, rents, rants, rats, roaches, and ants.

“I think I can come right out and ethically propose to you that we should consider the whole of our society to be the swirling waters that regulate the contradictory unity of our little group. That might sound abstract or big, and it might be, but whatever it is, it’s the opposite of profound. I want you to realize how mundane all this is.

“Nuts and knots. Something from nothing. New wine, old sacks. Frogs in swirling hot water baths. Centripetal force. A real situation. A conundrum. Reality.” Rytius paced a bit.

“I still haven’t decided the topic of my presentation, but I’ll tell you when I’m finished.” Everybody laughed, most applauded, and some recordkeepers stood to applaud.

“You know I’m just playing, though. It’s all in the game. I know the prince, and I might maybe even say that I know him well, and, of course, my brother works for the prince. I know that the prince and his council work hard to ensure our means of survival, and I myself have personally fought and shed blood for New Ark’s independence, for the prince’s place at the table with the other rulers of these lands. So I know that when something needs doing, the council is on top of it.” Rytius backed off to one side of the floor and turned to face the council, and he began to clap, and to lead those gathered in a round of grateful applause.

“And Prince Feelharmonica leads the council in virtually all matters. He delegates duties in a responsible fashion, but there must be no doubt that Prince Feelharmonica has agreed to any significant state action, policy, or regulation in New Ark. Am I right, councilors?” Rytius asked the councilors, who agreed, sensing some rhetorical danger, but not caring much one way or the other.

“So, in a very real sense, if something in society boils up to the level where it requires state intervention, it’s coming under Feelharmonica’s purview. As it should.

“So, we have demonstrated that Prince Feelharmonica, as sovereign of New Ark, is the master of all those processes that work on and about the bits of our lives. He is the poacher. I mean, he is—must be—the cook boiling the water, swirling it, and dropping the egg.

“And yes, that is true almost by construction, because of the manner in which the power of the sovereign flows through the law and the rest of the power sculpture. And we knew this even before this hearing began because we knew that Prince Feelharmonica’s policy is the reason for the hearing at all.”

Rytius paused to expand his diagram. “I want you all to remember that it’s two things happening at the same time. If you just heat the egg, you get a boiled egg. If you just swirl the egg, you get some sort of raw egg soup.”

“The swirling hot water works inside the egg, too,” Rytius began again. “There is a time, a window within which the two fluids held together in opposition can still slide apart if some small factor of rotation or temperature changes. The swirling water takes a different time to cook each fluid. It works from without by centripetal force, that’s the law for instance. How does it work within? With heat. That’s ambient radiation.”

Rytius drew a poached egg by itself at the bottom of his diagram. “I didn’t label the white, but you can see the yolk there.”

“Do you guys know the joke about the fish in the water?” Rytius asked. Somebody yelled “Tell it.” “Some of you might remember it from Rainbow’s Pot O’Gold Get Down last year?” Rytius asked again. Some recordkeepers sounded their recollection.

“I’ll tell everybody,” Rytius said. “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, fish. How’s the water?’ The youngsters just ignore him and keep on swimming. A couple minutes later, one of them looks over at the other and asks, ‘What the hell is water?’ ”

There was a nice round of laughter at the arrogance of youth.

“This is the joy of recordkeeping. You learn these little tricks like listening when people talk,” Rytius laughed with the listeners. “What is it that you’re surrounded by but just don’t know? If you’re a fish, it’s water. If you’re one of us, here, alive, today, in New Ark, it’s hot water!”

The citizens laughed at a higher pitch, now anxious because implicated.

“Let me be honest with you about something. I just made a mistake and I’d like to apologize. I was demagogic and went for a cheap joke just a second ago, about the hot water. That just puts us right back where we started, and it makes me have wasted a good minute or so developing the theme of something in the hot ambient-radiation water.

“Because I’m embarrassed now, I’ll just say plainly what I should have said, which is that we need to identify our water. In this particular case, the confiscation of the lifework of dozens of citizens of New Ark by Prince Feelharmonica himself. It’s like a noose around our necks.

“But let’s look closely, please, at our metaphor and our situation. We have an egg swirling in hot water, slippy for a time, and as the water transmits its heat to those two, they set, locking into their final positions against one another, defined by one another. They can no longer change form, though they can be broken apart. But you have to have both the heat and the swirl simultaneously. That’s the only way to get to the poached egg.”

“And let’s not forget that the heat and the swirl have to be coordinated, somehow, in their simultaneity. That’s up to the cook, not to overheat the water, and not to swirl too hard.”

“By now most of you probably think that I am laying a foundation to accuse Prince Feelharmonica of meddling in the affairs of the recordkeepers to the detriment of my faction and the benefit of the Speculative Historians. It’s a much simpler matter than that, and it has everything to do with why our two factions could never come to terms with one another, why we never finished our debate, and why water is elemental, despite being a compound. Water is that which mixes the miscible. This can mix with that in the medium, and the medium is the water, which is the third element, and thereby always an element. That’s logical.

“But in the real illogical world, some of the waters in which we swim are lax penalties for ignorance, open corruption in the production of wealth such that the people cannot pay even those paltry fees, and craven fear consumed as though it were respect. Can you imagine the fellows on the bed of this river?”

Rytius modified his diagram. “Remember, you can’t unpoach an egg, and you can’t cook an egg and then swirl it, or swirl it and then cook it. Poaching is a combination of the two, but you can’t factor either one out and get to a poached egg.”

“But I’m trying to spark something here with these two concepts—the miscible mixing medium in which we swim and the swamp of corruption crawling with strange bedfellows. I’m trying to push them together and hopefully reveal the sort of waters in which, say, Prince Feelharmonica and any faction of recordkeepers could mingle. We’re talking about swirling heat, cooking the inside an egg. It’s no run-of-the-mill corruption, like money under the table, that sustains our little group, yolk and white, in disunion. It has to be more like the prince and the faction share a worldview. That’s part of the coordination. They fit together in a way that escapes immediate understanding of either. Like water for the young fish.

“Even better, to keep the shapes aligned, it is more like…the ever more rigid, ever more opaque white of the egg is the way the water appears to the yolk. Tellem’s faction is the way the whirlpool of corruption, i.e., our world, appears to us, the core group performing the core activity without which the faction wouldn’t exist. While the prince’s confiscation and this hearing are somehow a manner of regulation.”

Rytius drew another diagram next to the first.

It was virtually identical.

“It’s all about coordinating the processes. It stands to reason that there would be something on the order of collaboration between the prince and the Speculative Historians, to place them in control of the tower and its research objectives. My brother Ritius is charged with enforcing the law, such as it is. He has to press it home, and that’s the swirl. But the corruption…  The corruption is the law itself—the entire legal apparatus—and the agent of that corruption must be none other than Councilor Justice Boniface, administrator of that apparatus.”

There were jeers from the Speculative Historians. Ritius, seated in the front row, gestured to a lieutenant, whereupon additional security personnel gathered at the exits. The hall was full of commotion. Tellem walked out, and Rytius breathed deeply and remained calm. He turned to face the council, and he made a point of meeting each of their eyes.

“Speculation?” he continued. “Yes. But I want you to see just how strong speculation can be.”

“They swim in the same water. The prince feels himself adrift, and the Speculative Historians promise to be able to shout ‘Land ahoy!’ any day now, as they have for years. The prince wants a shrink-wrapped, prepackaged history, a usable past upon which to build his kingdom, and the Speculative Historians want to rediscover America, even at the cost of mistaking the natives for Indians. Again. This is the worldview they share. They both want firm ground to stand on. They are afraid of water.

“So, the trap I have to avoid today is saying anything to negatively influence the prince’s decision. There’s something else, too, for which I have already apologized.

“That’s demagogy. See, I could been taking easy shots at our prince and his council the whole time, testing their patience, but meanwhile mastering the hall. But I want to fill old sacks with new wine, and that new wine is a new spirit abroad, and not just among us recordkeepers. Fila identified it yesterday for the first time, in the way we name our children.

“This is the humility we have learned in the loss of our past, and we should be grateful for it. The way we name our children shows that we know something the olden ones didn’t: the relationships we build are more important than the ones we are born to. Or those we rediscover while seeking lost shores, magic treasures, or readymade narratives. Family names, and even family histories, are accidents. What we choose to make of ourselves in light of them is what matters. We know this. All of us who have chosen our names know this. We just don’t know that that’s what we know.

“Well, now we know, and Fila said it first. I could keep this knowledge to myself, as I speak up here, and not let one half of the audience in on the secret I am sharing with the other half, so that the first half doesn’t understand the passion of the response to arguments they mistakenly believe themselves to understand. This would disorient them, but they would feel the force of our side. I could master the hall that way, too. But the target is off. I don’t want to persuade non-recordkeepers of anything other than the value of recordkeeping, and I want to valorize neither the hoarding of knowledge in secret nor the hoarders of secret knowledge.

“My only target is the nexus of corruption that brings us here today. And that nexus includes those I am still willing to call recordkeepers, though they themselves are not.

“I want to expose all of this. And I want you to see how funny it is, from my point of view, and then I’ll close. Remember, the Speculative Historians are the form the state takes for us. The state is aligned with them, and the state may as well be them. Because the state has no special existence for us except through our relation with them. Which is how I solved their relationship in the hot water metaphor. And that’s the only way I could sketch out the power sculpture, revealing the nature of the relationship.

“I want to confess one more instance of demagoguery. That’s the metaphor of egg white and egg yolk taking their final form against one another, defined by one another. That’s good as far as it goes, but it’s not really applicable here, because we never excluded them because we could never agree to disagree. We could never really hash everything out. We were always fatally split, and, having failed to achieve the impossible, we recordkeepers, the only ones who actually ethically require the confrontation, are cursed that when we finally get it, it takes the form of us against what is, effectively, the world.

“So, in attempting to save my nuts by slipping the knot of the noose the prince has around our necks, I fell…no, it felt like I was falling, but I had always been sitting, like a frog, in the swirling hot whirlpool of corruption that is the sovereignty of New Ark, only there to discover, while dissolving into broth, that the swirl and the heat have killed once and for all any potential for life the egg may have had. That’s the cooking metaphor, though, and the frog is done.

“I grab my nuts as the noose gets tighter, and I pray I can, one more time, Lord, pull something out of nothing. It better be good, and I hope they can tell after just one game.

“Before I close, with words of no particular fire, because I doused my own flame, I would like to say, in the language of the marketplace and the lawyers, and the lawyers of the marketplace and the marketplace of lawyers, that recordkeeping is a real value deal, I mean in terms of civic virtue. Consider that I just sketched the outline of an ongoing crime involving Prince Feelharmonica, Councilor Boniface, my brother, and Tellem Ralph. I don’t have conclusive evidence, but you can see what’s going on. Right? So, I’m saying, Prince, call me after you kick these scrubs to the curb, OK? We’ll have lunch. My treat.

“My presentation tonight will have been about how to blow your game up in front of everybody but still come out on top because recordkeeping has been real, folks.”