From: Brygg Ullmer [ullmer@media.mit.edu]
Sent: Friday, February 19, 1999 1:39 AM
To: Brygg Ullmer
Subject: Count Zero

Count Zero -- 1986.

p15

...He held something in his hands, a box of some kind.

..."Come here, child.  Show us your marvel."

"Senor," Paco lisped, bowing, and stepped forward to exhibit the thing he
held.

"Cornell," she said, her tears forgotten.  "Cornell?"  She turned to Virek.

"Of course not.  The object set into that length of bone is a Braun
biomonitor.  This is the work of a living artist."

"There are more?  More boxes?"

"I have found seven. Over a period of years.  The Virek Collection, you see,
is a sort of black hole.  The unnatural density of my wealth drags
irresistibly at the rarest works of the human spirit.  An autonomous
process, and one I ordinarily take little interest in..."

But Marly was lost in the box, in its evocation of impossible distances, of
loss and yearning.  It was somber, gentle, and somehow childlike.  It
contained seven objects.

The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of
some large bird.  Three archaic circuit boards, faced with mazes of gold.  A
smooth white sphere of baked clay.  An age-blackened fragment of lace.  A
finger-length segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist,
grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument
that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin -- but the
thing's face was seared and blackened.

The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human
experience.

"Gracias, Paco."

Box and boy were gone.

p226:

She was watching the manipulators, hypnotized by the way they moved; as they
picked through the swirl of things, they also caused it, grasping and
rejecting, the rejected objects whirling away, striking others, drifiting
into new alignments.  The process stirred them gently, slowly, perpetually.
...

She remembered the Wig's mad eyes, the craziness she'd felt roll off him in
waves; she remembered the ugly cunning she'd sensed in his voice, over the
Sweet Jane's radio.  Why would Jones show this kind of concern?  But then
she thought about what it would be like, living in the Place, the dead cores
of Tessier-Ashpool.  Anything human, anything alive, might come to seem
quite precious here ... "You're right," she said.  "Go and find him."
...

The turret swung back and forth, humming, the manipulators darting,
finishing the new poem...

* * *

She was never certain, afterward, that the voices were real, but eventually
she came to feel that they had been a part of one of those situations in
which real becomes merely another concept.

She'd taken off her jacket, because the air in the dome seemed to have grown
warmer, as though the ceaseless movement of the arms generated heat.  She'd
anchored the jacket and her purse on a strut beside the sermon screen.  The
box was nearly finished now, she thought, althought it moved so quickly, in
the padded claws, that it was difficult to see . . .  Abruptly, it floated
free, tumbling end over end, and she sprang for it instinctively, caught it,
and went tumbling past the flashing arms, her treasure in her arms.  Unable
to slow herself, she struck the far side of the dome, bruising her shoulder
and tearing her blouse.  Drifting, stunned, she cradled the box, staring
through the rectangle of glass at an arrangement of brown old maps and
tarnished mirror.  The seas of the cartographers had been cut away, exposing
the flaking mirrors, landmasses afloat on dirty silver . . .  She looked up
in time to see a glittering arm snag the floating sleeve of her Brussels
jacket.  Her purse, half a meter behind it and tumbling gracefully, went
next, hooked by a manipulator tipped with an optic sensor and a simple claw.

She watched as her things were drawn into the ceaseless dance of the arms.
Minutes later, the jacket came whirling out again.  Neat squares and
rectangles seemed to have been cut away, and she found herself laughing.
She released the box she held.  "Go ahead," she said.  "I am honored."  The
arms whirled and flashed, and she heard the whine of a tiny saw.

I am honored I am honored I am honored -- Echos of her voice in the dome
setting up a shifting forest of smaller, partial sounds, and behind them,
very faint . . . Voices . . .

"You're here, aren't you?" she called, adding to the ring of sound, ripples
and reflections of her fragmented voice.

--Yes, I am here.

"Wigan would say you've always been here, wouldn't he?"

--Yes, but it isn't true.  I came to be, here.  Once I was not.  Once, for a
brilliant time, time without duration, I was everywhere as well. . . But the
bright time broke.  The mirror was flawed.  Now I am only one . . . But I
have my song, and you have heard it.  I sing with these things that float
around me, fragments of the family that funded my birth.  There are others,
but they will not speak to me.  Vain, the scattered fragments of myself,
like children.  Like men.  They send me new things, but I prefer the old
things.  Perhaps I do their bidding.  They plot with men, my other selves,
and men imagine they are gods . . .

"You are the thing that Virek seeks, aren't you?"

--No. He imagines that he can translate himself, code his personality into
my fabric.  He yearns to be what I once was.  What he might become most
resembles the least of my broken selves . . .

"Are you -- are you sad?"

--No.

"But your -- your songs are sad."

--My songs are of time and distance.  The sadness is in you.  Watch my arms.
There is only the dance.  These things you treasure are shells.

"I -- I knew that.  Once."

But now the sounds were sounds only, no forest of voices behind them to
speak as one voice, and she watched the perfect globes of her tears spin out
to join forgotten human memories in the dome of the boxmaker.


"I understand," she said, sometime later, knowing that she spoke now for the
comfort of hearing her own voice.  She spoke quietly, unwilling to wake that
bounce and ripple of sound.  "You are someone else's collage.  Your maker is
the true artist.  Was it the mad daughter?  It doesn't matter.  Someone
brought the machine here, welded it to the dome, and wired it to the traces
of memory.  And spilled, somehow, all the worn sad evidences of a family's
humanity, and left it all to be stirred, to be sorted by a poet.  To be
sealed away in boxes.  I know of no more extraordinary work than this.  No
more complex gesture . . ."  a silver-fitted tortoise comb with broken teeth
drifted past.  She caught it like a fish and dragged the teeth through her
hair.

. . . . .