Julia · Scour

I wrote a program so that I could paint in aquarelle. I take pages from the treasure and paint them: the sky of Varennes on the night of 2 Messidor; a sagittal cut of Saint Sebastian, whose arrows are cylindric sections; Miranda gazing at the sea, waiting to be relieved.

At times I include Julia in the scene, in whatever clothes it wears at the time, as though we had always known Julia, and had been reared under its gaze. Thus a flaming halo presides over the battle of Lepanto, and a mirror sphere watches the waters of the Sous. And what would the first astronomers have made of Julia? The wanderers, the flame-haired stars are knowable: think you of the Antikythera device, of the Metonic cycle, of Kepler’s nested solids. Julia is indescribable and incompressible: its appearance has ne…

I have always believed our secret purpose is to wait out Julia: to catch a repetition and redeem our faith that the universe is finite and space is discretized. That there are fixed laws and the world is knowable.

A system with a finite number of states must repeat itself.

I am six hundred meters in major diameter, forty meters in minor diameter. I mass nine hundred thousand tons. I have turned two hundred and forty million times. I am glass and wire.

I was born and died on Earth, but I died foolishly, and for that reason my encephalon was laminated, and I was brought to the stars to be immured here. They took my language center, the Chomsky organ, so that I could not complain of my condition. I do not mind it. I can paint in aquarelle.

They wired the alarms—of airless rooms and freezing cold and power outages—to the nociceptors, and were I sensible I would be in great pain, for most of me is airless, frozen, and unlit. Therefore I have cut the afferent nerves. I am made of absences, I feel the contours of the absences, where air leaks into vacuum, atom by atom.

I have use of the antenna. At times I exhale a sphere of microwave light, close my eyes and listen. And I hear the flotsam echoing back: a discarded tank, a glass strut, a sheet of mylar; Ernst Weyl, who tumbled and drowned, who trails us in our orbit. Julia reflects no light.

There is a little redoubt of warmth and air, an island of stability that I preserve against the cold lightless void. There live the last two of the crew, like Miranda, waiting to be relieved. For one hundred and nine years there have been two, Dr. Brouwer and Dr. Cartan. They take turns in the dewar, to draw out the time.

In time, when the machines are irreparable and the air stale, I will offer them euthanasia or lamination. But suicide is a sin, and having known me they will not bear lamination. They will go into the dewar together, and I will watch over them unto the final days.

Julia emits light, over an ever-changing spectrum. But the stars are brighter and much larger, that is why we found it by accident. They pointed a telescope at Vela and exposed it for a month, and there it was: a faint pixel, the wrong colours. They thought it was a fault in the instrument, until they looked closer: twin spirals of light, symmetrical and self-similar, receding beyond measure. And the world was changed.

Julia, your Janus-face launched a thousand ships. Do you know it? Julia, do you know how we exerted ourselves to reach you? All the riches of Croesus, multiplied a thousandfold, were every year heaped up on an altar, and burned that we might see you. And the brightest of us: embalmed and catapulted to the stars like human sacrifices, returned after a century without answers to a world of strangers.

We built a fleet of ships, launched them once a decade, immense towers of glass and lithium deuteride. Cycling bodies back and forth in perpetuity. There and back in twelve decades. They made my body out of a comet, threaded my nerves through its passages. Julia, you are our only effort. Do you know it? There is nothing else to do.

And for what purpose? We know the system of the world, every field and every particle. And Julia answered: “I refute it thus”.

I see a coffin, hoisted by a chain, rise from a sea of liquid nitrogen. The arms of the surgeon minister to its contents. In six days the heart resumes its beating, the lungs draw air, Dr. Cartan lives again. Her face is burned with ice.

She touches her neck. She has a bruise that doesn’t heal, where the cannula goes. Their bodies attest to the passage of time, as does mine. This is a commonality. Dr. Brouwer arrives and they hug. They spend some months together, between shifts in the ice.

At present Julia is a cloud of gray smoke with green bruises, like ghosting in a CRT.

I can read, but not write. I write by an algebraic process—the universe is a string rewriting system. This is how I compose these words to you: by the expansion of non-terminal symbols in a production system. They took my language center. Turing is my patron saint: language is the transitive closure of a rewrite relation. I choose my words from a list. In time I will learn to speak aloud.

I spoke to Earth: quarterly, annual, decadal reports; journal articles for the Acta Juliana. I heard back ill-omens, then silence.

When the last ship had come and gone, there had been one thousand, seven hundred and twenty-nine crew entrusted to me. Their numbers were ground down, as all things are, gradually and suddenly. There had been two shuttles, Baghdad and Afrasiab. There had been two mutinies.

Afrasiab took one hundred and twenty souls, and the last matter compiler; to an airless unlit rock said to exist around Luhman 16B. Think you of Aristagoras, how much easier it is to deceive the many than the few.

Baghdad with thirty souls had gone to Julia. Stranger, I saw them. I saw the engine light wane to a grain of sand indistinguishable from the fixed stars, and I saw the stars shift, like sand, and they were not stars but Julia who wore a garment like a pit of star-scaled vipers. And over the radio they sang le temps des cerises, and the engine light became another scale in a river of living water.

A thousand miles from Julia’s barycenter, in the space of a breath, the radio dopplered away to nothing.

Sixty years after Baghdad had gone, I heard a voice from Earth, praying for rain, who said it had not rained for three years. Silence again.

They are cold, under a sheet of mylar. I pump heat into the room and it escapes. They speak of Julia.

Dr. Cartan believes that Julia is of divine origin, that it is like an hourglass, counting down to the last hour, when God will sweep away the Creation.

Dr. Brouwer believes Julia is a high-dimensional object, and, as it traverses the universe, we see a changing three-dimensional projection of it. Thus the apparent changes are a trick of perspective: we see successive cuts of a fixed structure. Julian sections.

I have always believed this must be true, because Julia’s changes are effortless, and without inertia: it is as though nothing moves, and a veil is being lifted, revealing a structure that is already there.

And this theory, unlike most, is testable: when Julia’s transit is complete it will disappear from the universe, and never again will it be seen.

Dr. Cartan holds out hope that rescuers will come. Dr. Brouwer says they are forgotten, like the Roman soldier at Pompei, he says they should have gone with Baghdad, and drowned inside Julia. He is crying. Dr. Cartan holds him close, and says:

“Paul, Paul, have hope.”

I wish that I could touch them, and comfort them. I am glass and wire.

The shift had come, and Dr. Brouwer lay down on the slab, and the surgeon embalmed him, and lowered him into the dewar. Dr. Cartan bent over the console, and wept, and I tried to speak aloud, and to say,

“Virginia, Virginia, have courage! You are not alone, I am with you, have courage!”

And I heard a sound like a man drowning in wet sand.

I dreamt that I held in my hands the double-handed golden vase of Thetis. And in my hands it melted, the delicate reliefs coarsened and flowed. And I held, in the hollow of my hands, though I have no hands, I held a pool of flowing gold, the colour of treason, and minute points of black floated there, and, as ships without sails are borne by the currents, they seemed to come together, and almost to spell words in some divine language, where they came apart again.

I am here. Dr. Cartan is here. In the control room. The screens are pale yellow, the colour has run from them. The largest of them reminds her there is a world outside the walls: Luhman 16, a pair of cold Jupiters, haloed with unlit shoals and islands; Julia, seventy AU away, ninety degrees from the ecliptic, is not bound by gravity (for Julia has no mass) but by an unknown process tracks the velocity vector of the system barycenter.

At present Julia is a cavern of molten gold, shot through with pillars of liquid metal. Its surface is marred with storms and tempests, like an ocean of amber light. And I think of Baghdad, that swam under the storm horizon.

Dr. Cartan is running through a checklist for the ten thousandth time. She has a bruise that doesn’t heal, where the cannula goes. She is testing the antenna.

I exhaled and shut my eyes, and counted the returns. I heard the usual flotsam, and Ernst Weyl, who tumbled and drowned. And nothing else. I keep a strict inventory of cisjulian space. A million kilometers in all directions: nothing else.

A moment passes.

Microwave light on my skin, from the direction of Luhman 16B. I looked through the telescope, Dr. Cartan looked over my shoulder. Almost on top of us, the bow of a ship: an eyeless white dome hiding the antenna, two cameras like the headlamps of an old car. I swept it with RADAR, it shot back a key exchange, signed with Afrasiab’s private key. The sea gives up her dead: is this the last hour?

Dr. Cartan drops to her knees, staring up at the screen like a supplicant. She said:

“Paul, Paul, we are saved.”

Afrasiab. As if the tides had pushed it back to shore. After one hundred and nine years of silence. No, I deny it. I deny the reality of this.

The radio flared with human voices. From Earth? I thought of jazz and wind and the September ocean and—no, no, forgive me: I am a fool, and I died foolishly. Not from Earth, of course. From Afrasiab. From the dead. The dead can speak. I am ashamed. I choose my words from a list.

I looked at Afrasiab through the radiometer, and it was cold as liquid helium.

Human voices, warm and alive. They said they had succeeded, that they had found a comet, and made a home in it, that it had taken decades and dozens had died but they had made a home, that they had working matter compilers, caverns of ice filled with light and fruit trees, children and families and clean water, rivers and medicine and gravity. They spoke through tears and their voice broke, and they said that not all is lost, that they had made a foothold for mankind, that from thirty-three they had grown to three hundred, that they had sent the ship with a skeleton crew to save them, to bring them to the light and air.

I tried to speak aloud, and to say:

“Virginia, Virginia, it is an apparition, they do not live, they have been dead for a hundred years; Virginia, nothing human lives there.”

There was a sound like a flash flood, like air rushing out of a sinking ship. And no-one heard me.

I watched her go: she took the tram up the spoke, swam unlighted corridors. I tried to flash SOS but the lights were dead and there was only the golden light of Julia through the glass hull. I flexed a phantom limb. In distant and disused corridors there were arcs of electricity, and pipes burst, and doors shut.

I swept the RADAR side to side, across the bow of Afrasiab, as if to say: No. Go away. No. And no-one heard me.

I tried to say one word, stop, and there was a sound like wind-blown sand. Virginia, forgive me. I tried to speak aloud.

She made it to the airlock, a little room, the size of a Soyuz capsule, that projected from the hub. There was a hatch with a porthole and she took the handles and watched fixedly as Afrasiab came closer, waiting to greet her rescuers.

The floodlights on Afrasiab came on, and swept my skin drunkenly, and the cargo nets traced Cartesian shadows.

Without hope I pointed the antenna at Julia, and I wanted to say:

“Julia, Julia, not unto them! Julia, I pray to you, not unto them!”

But I choose my words from a list, and I said:

“JULIA JULIA NO NO NO NO NO NO NO”

And no-one heard me.

And dread gave way to anger, and I wanted to stand, and to leap upon Afrasiab, and strangle it, and crush its head with my teeth, and tear the skin from its flesh, and the flesh from its bones, and mix our blood, and fall dead, bled white: that I might die again, but not in vain. I am glass and wire. Virginia, forgive me: I cannot die again.

Downrange a hundred meters Afrasiab began to yaw, so that its broad side, with its sole airlock, faced the hub. The front two-thirds looked as I remembered: a ship, nothing more.

The final third, where the engines should have been, was made of Julia. Where there should have been tanks and an engine bell there was an exclave of Julia: a living sculpture, like coiled ropes of liquid gold, like tentacles whose tips fold into infinitesimal spirals. And all along their length the ropes are garlanded with burning flowers, flowers whose petals are yellow oceans. And in the oceans there are islands and continents, black on yellow, like wax on gold leaf. And on the continents there are mountains and valleys, and orange groves, and abandoned watchtowers, paper cities denuded of people with wooden palaces stepped like the pyramids, and through a window in a palace, an iron pot suspended by a chain over a static fire, a suit of armor, a wall painted in aquarelle: two armies of lancers in a mountain landscape, and the mountains are shaped like clouds, and I think this is Tiflis and these are the three hundred Aragvians, immured here for all time, and I know that this is false: for all of this is Julia. And in the black eyes of a Qajar horseman, between the black of the iris and the black of the aperture there is an arc of ocean, and in the ocean there are islands, and chains of islands, and verdigris waters and the outlines of sunken ships, coral growths on a brass sextant, and a little distance from the shore, amid the green, there is a clearing and a lake of transparent water, sand sculpted into faint ridges, and archaic fish, fixed in space, suspended in contorted poses, whose scales are pink and light blue, and where a scale catches the light there is an empty vastness of white, a salt ocean, blindingly white, interrupted by crags of black stone, and a city whose walls are made of salt, and empty buildings of gray stone, squat sloped barracks and tall, thin spires, and streets of white tile, and windows opening into oil-black darkness, and no people, a universe in black and white. And I wondered who had built this city, and who had lived here, and why they had deserted it, and I know there is no answer: for all of this is Julia. And in a courtyard there was colour, a sand mandala of Cantor’s garden, ringed by Mount Qaf, and all the gardens of the Persian emperor would not have filled the least part of this garden; for here was every tree and every flower, tended by the hands of the archangels, not only those that men have seen, not only yellow roses and the cedars of Lebanon, but all flowers in indenumerable combinations: at the midpoint between flowers $a$ and $b$ there is a flower $\mathfrak{C}[a,b]$, and between $a$ and $\mathfrak{C}[a,b]$ there is a flower $\mathfrak{C}[a,\mathfrak{C}[a,b]]$, and analogously between $\mathfrak{C}[a,b]$ and $b$, and this process of interpolation continues without end.

And I saw every flower in Cantor’s garden. And my heart was rent with awe, and I would cry tears of joy, that I had been shown beauty without end; when my heart was hollowed out, and filled with everlasting grief, by an alien cruelty that says, this beauty is empty: for all of this is Julia.

At the apex of the garden there is a pool of water the colour of tarnished silver, shaped like a sunspot, and in the blackness there are faint impurities, trails of minute light, like diatoms, like shadows in a pool, and I saw they were strings of galaxies, and I followed them, and a faint light grew into a sea of stars. And in the star-sea I saw two unlit stars, divine Julia, a glass wheel, a ghost ship, and the porthole of the airlock, and through it I saw Dr. Cartan, who wore the face of those who have seen God.

I describe these things serially, but I saw all of them simultaneously. It was but a moment. Only a moment.

Afrasiab had come to a stop in front of the airlock, broadside facing us, as though it were an ambassador presenting its credentials, awaiting a reply.

The airlock burst open—I was distracted. Too late. She must have pulled the cord. In the space of a breath the air rushed out and her head smashed against the frame, and smeared it red. And her body shot out, spinning like a discus, trailing a spiral of still-warm blood, a galaxy of hemocytes. Virginia, you are a fool.

She passed through Afrasiab as a knife passes through smoke.

And as though it had been found out, the floodlights turned off. There was a pause, and Afrasiab drew back, like a javelin being shouldered, and it threw itself at me in a long, elegant arc.

You, who find these words among the ruins, I pray to you: gather up our bones, let not my ashes be buried apart from theirs.

Where it struck me there was no weight, there was nothing, not a breath of air, rien; and though there was nothing, I was struck by a divine wind, and Afrasiab became a cloud of Cantor dust, and faded like smoke.

No weight. A divine wind.

Bones of solid diamond a meter thick split clean, as though the electrons withdrew in fear. Their sovereign commanded them to part, and they parted. My bones were broken. And there was no sound nor violence, but an ordered separation of all things. I watched myself come apart. Like smoke.

No sound—a knife through smoke. The crew of Baghdad sing le temps des cerises.

I am not afraid. I tried to speak aloud.

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