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Dolly Magaziner Burghar. Adrienne Burghar Lane’s mother. The dreamy, mysticism-driven but brilliantly clever woman — consciousness — who’d sparked her husband’s development of the anechoic metal box of a room which had launched Gabriel Naude into his future as The Librarian. How had he forgotten her, of all people: the first and only other one, besides Gabe himself, to have used the box, been launched into pure consciousness?
Like I said: you’ve been busy. You haven’t had time to think of everything. The grin-idea flared. Not important now. I knew we’d cross paths.
But how could she know—
Wordlessly, without speaking within his consciousness, somehow she… she gestured. Directed his attention, there– and thenward, Ifth– and Oofthward, to a far corner of the universe’s interwoven space- and timelines. He saw Dolly in her human form, sitting in the box, believing but not knowing what immediate future awaited her, eyes shining and heart pounding not in fear but in excitement, around her head swirling a dense cloud of glitter. He saw Dolly lower her eyelids, enter a split-second of meditative calm. He saw Matt Burghar press and hold the green-ringed button on the control panel, saw the lights flare, flicker, then go out completely, and saw — despite the darkness — the infinitesimally brief flicker of astonishment and delight on Dolly’s face just before she vanished—
Uh-huh. Same as you: I was suddenly looking at myself from outside myself. And then—
She gestured again, and The Librarian saw that busy idea-cloud of Dolly’s, liberated from physicality, suddenly burst outward into a much larger but still coherent cloud. And then the cloud was gone.
Not gone, exactly, not in the sense of absent. More like…
She paused for a moment, and The Librarian felt her sifting among the ideas in his own cloud. One of them suddenly flared.
Right. You call it lunging. In a dream, right? But you don’t have to dream to do it. While we’ve been having this little chat, in fact, I’ve done it thirty-four times, using just the old linear number system. Back and forward to this exact moment and place.
“‘It’?”
The Librarian didn’t notice the subtle shift: he’d started to address her directly, rather than thinking about her. Dolly didn’t miss the moment, though, and he saw, without knowing what it meant, a little cluster of ideas glimmering in her own cloud. Her own private set of smiles: satisfaction, fondness, reassurance, certitude…
That’s right. “It.” If you never meditated you may never have noticed yourself doing it. But you’re a creative person, Gabe. You’ve done it: suddenly and very, very briefly blacked out as we used to say, gone from your own head, and returned before you knew it, slightly changed — enriched — by the experience. And while you’ve been collecting ideas, the products of creation, I’ve been harvesting the how-tos, the processes.
“You mean the techniques? Oil paint on canvas, counterpoint, syntax?”
No. Those are ideas, too, and you’ve become amazingly adept at collecting them as well as the ideas of the works themselves. What I collect are the, the…
He felt her sifting again, groping for some metaphor they might share in common. She gestured again, and The Librarian again saw Gabriel Naude’s moment of minor inspiration from deep in REM sleep, the idea of slightly over-exposing a print of the photograph of the city park. But just at the moment the idea sparked with silver light, the scene froze. Dolly gestured one more time, and the perspective changed too, becoming an abrupt zoom into the infinitely-dimensioned “moment.” It blossomed, opened up, stretched and unfurled before him, all around him. He remembered the experience of dropping packaged Oriental noodles into a pot of boiling water, how they had erupted out of stasis into a writhing whirl of brilliant-white activity. This was like that, and exotically more: all the dimensions of time and space, of color and music, of number and sheer possibility springing forth everywhere…
How had he missed this? Why had he never thought to zoom in—
I keep telling you: you’ve been busy. But I’ve been busy too, and this — these — are what I’ve been collecting. All these sudden unfoldings. Call them instants of inspiration. Moments of fire. I think we’re not so different, really. We’ve just been approaching the same thing, from two different angles. But I think we’re ready now. Almost.
—-
It turned out that Dolly, too, had been contemplating (from her own, yes, different angle) the enigma of the spongy curtain in which the universe sailed. She, too, had concluded that it must mark the limit between the known and the unknown, between all of existence and all of nonexistence, between that which could be experienced and that which could not. But unlike Gabe — The Librarian — she had an idea how to cross it.
She explained it to Gabe as well as she could. (He’d already guessed that her intelligence might or not be “greater” than his, but it was certainly of a different kind.)
What else, she asked, rippled at the margin of known and unknown?
Gabe couldn’t even guess, not until she’d shown him several thousand examples and he’d thought about it for a millennium-of-a-moment or two. What existed at the margin she spoke of, he thought, were ideas that no one had ever had. All those ideas-to-be (or ideas-not-to-be) could flare into existence — crossed over from unknown to known — only when all the other ideas available to a given consciousness were harnessed to the engine of imagination and lit afire by attention. At the moment of attention: that was when the universe burst forth, spectacularly, from a grain of sand.
And what was attention?
It was intention, she said: a background of constant undirected purpose, fueling a sudden burst of directed purpose. That had been the startling thing about the old physicists, Heisenberg and Schroedinger and Einstein and the rest — their deep understanding, finally filtered into popular culture, that the known universe existed because it was known, because it had been attended to at last. Human consciousness didn’t just observe reality, but created it.
But here was the trick: you couldn’t be intending to create it. You had to be ready to intend it; you had to be comfortable with the tools and the processes of creation, and you had to have the raw materials of all that had been created before, or at least all that you knew of.
And while going about your business of life and of work — while looking elsewhere, whether taking a shower or collecting all the ideas and creative processes known to humanity — you just had to sort of let your peripheral vision slide over the surface of the unknown, and let your attention burst in that direction of its own accord. And there you’d have it: a hardening, iridescent bit of reality, a new reality.
No, Dolly said, she didn’t know why it “had” to be that way. And she didn’t believe the reason why mattered in the slightest. She just knew — she used that word — that was how they’d cross to the curtained other side, taking humanity’s legacy with them.
“Don’t you think we should test this theory first?”
How are we going to test it, Gabe? The unknown can be unknown only until it’s not unknown anymore. The “test,” as you call it, is the proof.
He recognized this Dolly, this hard core of inscrutable knowingness. He’d seen her before: at the tiniest fragment of an instant just before her husband had launched her across a similar dividing line, with the simple press of a button. That look on her face back then—
That’s right. I knew then, too. But I didn’t know I knew it, and I know that now. She grinned, and this time Gabe grinned back.
—-
Their plan of action — for by then it was theirs, The Librarian’s vast collection of ideas merged with Dolly Burghar’s, the whole of it infused with her boiling pot of how and intention — their plan of action was just to, well, practice. You got good at something not solely by meaning to. That was important, but you had to hold the intention at arm’s length. What really made you good at something was doing it, over and over, in simulation if the real thing wasn’t available.
So here were the former Dolly Burghar, nee Magaziner, and the former Gabriel Naude, out at a cosmically, cosmologically vast point in space and time, in number and pure energy. Holding hands, as it were, and facing carefully — by intention — away from their objective, towards the heart of the known. Their joint consciousness swathed in a percolating cape of silvery starpoints on a field of dark, they lunged repeatedly, Gabe finally getting the hang of doing so without dreaming, murmuring observations to each other back and forth in a language never spoken.
Somehow, Gabe knew what was going to happen, and mentioned this to Dolly. They’d be doing this cycle of lunge-and-rest, wouldn’t they? and it would become automatic, wouldn’t it?, and then at just the right split-moment they’d both sort of glance to the side, and their attention—
Sssshhh, she said, and then added: Yes, you’re right, I think. Maybe just a sudden beam of light or something, and we’ll follow, and then we’ll be through. But please don’t think about it, okay? Otherwise—
“Otherwise it won’t—”
—won’t work. It has to be done without—
“Without intention. Got it.”
And suddenly, as they talked about it — the conversation about it becoming the distraction from doing it that they’d needed — The Librarian saw a familiar expression flicker across Dolly’s unimaginable countenance, and he turned his consciousness in the same direction hers faced. Bursting forth from their enormous cloud of ideas, about forty degrees thereward and one hundred twenty thenward, was a sudden beam not of light but of non-light, solid impenetrable blackness. The Librarian glanced behind them; their backs were practically against the shimmering curtain, the ideas spread out in all directions and dimensions to all sides along the curtain’s inner surface; so if the beam of non-light were going that way then—
He glanced at Dolly, gestured at a new, brightly flickering cloudlet of ideas between them. She nodded: she’d seen it too. She smiled, a bit ruefully this time, and then she turned back to the dark beam. It could not be possible, not really, but The Librarian — Gabe — was certain he felt her squeeze his hand.
And then they were in motion, utterly unintended and utterly unstoppable motion, drawn along in the path of whatever was at the leading face of their joint attention, their speed picking up in every dimension, crossing and flickering back and forth from one dimension to another, a straight and solid so much more than physical dark line drawn through the heavens, faster and ever faster, crashing through galaxies and nebulae, shattering stars and planets and one star and one planet in particular, and in just an immeasurably small slice of infinity more the black beam hit the far side of the curtained sphere before them, hit it and bore on through, the edges of its passing boiling—
The clouds of ideas behind them, they too had accelerated, were now moving even faster than the consciousnesses which held them, had caught up, swarmed all about them.
Gabe looked to the woman beside him. Her consciousness was shining, and she was smiling, in bliss, even though he could sense her reflexes trembling a bit. She glanced towards him, and they both nodded, and turned back to the hole blasted through the curtain.
Gabe smiled, certain himself now.
And then, together, they leapt.
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This concludes the tale of the Propagational Librarian. The Propagational Library itself, it may be presumed, sailed on into some unfathomable future, carrying the light of humanity across universe after universe. But of its caretakers, Dolly and Gabe, no further history can be written: no human language exists for what they encountered next, on the far side of time, and what they encountered after that… But I like to think — I am sure — they were happy.
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