I’ll finish later: the intercom is clicking. I lift my eyes – it’s O-90, of course. In half a minute, she’ll be here: it’s time for our walk.
Darling O! I’ve always thought that she looks like her name: she’s about ten centimetres short of the Maternal Norm, which makes her every curve that much rounder – the pink O of her mouth, open to my every word. Also: the rounded, plump fold on her wrist, just like a small child’s.
When she came in, the flywheel of logic was still whirring inside me, so, out of inertia, I began to explain the formula I’d just come up with, unifying all of us and dancing and machines.
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, amazing,’ O-90 smiled at me rosily. ‘Spring!’
There she goes again, ‘Spring’ . . . I tell her one thing, and she’s . . . women . . . I fell silent.
Downstairs. The avenue was crowded: when the weather’s like this, we usually use our afternoon Personal Hour for extra walking. As always, the Music Factory was piping the March of the One State with all of its horns. Hundreds – no, thousands of numbers exuberantly stepped to the beat in orderly rows of four. Their blue-grey unifs1 had golden badges on their chests that were inscribed with each of their numbers. And I – we, the four of us – we were just one of the countless ripples in this mighty torrent. On my left, O-90 (if one of my hairy ancestors were writing this a thousand years ago, he would have probably referred to her with that ridiculous word ‘my’), and on my right, two numbers I didn’t know, male and female.
A divinely blue sky, tiny baby suns shining in every badge, faces unclouded by the insanity of thoughts . . . Rays of sun – you know? Everything made of the same smiling, radiant matter. And the brass bleating, ‘Tra ta ta tum, tra ta ta tum,’ like brass stairs blasted with sunlight, leading you upwards, higher and higher, into the dizzying blue . . .
And then, just like this morning at the hangar, I started seeing everything as though I were seeing it for the first time: the invariably straight streets, the glass of the pavements spraying up sunlight, translucent structures – celestial parallelepidipeds, grey-blue numbers marching in fours – all unified in quadratic harmony. A feeling came over me as though it hadn’t been whole generations but I – me – who had vanquished the old God, the old way of life, like I was the one who created all this, and, like a tower, didn’t dare to even move my elbow so I wouldn’t shatter the walls, the cupolas, the machines . . .
Then, from one moment to the next, I leapt through the centuries: from + to −. I suddenly recalled (ostensibly through association by contrast) – a painting I’d seen in a museum: a twentieth-century street, the deafeningly vibrant, chaotic riot of people, wheels, animals, posters, trees, colours, birds . . . and they say that that’s how it really was back then, that all of that was real and possible. It seemed so improbable to me now, so unbelievable, I couldn’t contain myself and burst out laughing.
Immediately, an echo – laughter – rang out from my right. I turned my head: the white, extraordinarily white and sharp teeth of an unfamiliar woman’s face beamed directly into my eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But you had such an inspired look on your face, like you were a mythical god on the seventh day of Creation. You seemed so sure that I too was your handiwork. What can I say, I’m quite flattered . . .’
She said all of this without a smile, and, I would even say, with a certain reverence (maybe she knew that I was the Builder of the Integral), but, at the same time, there was also some kind of inexplicable, irritating X factor to her – in her eyes, or maybe her eyebrows – I can’t put my finger on it or assign it any numerical value.
For some reason, I was embarrassed, and, fumbling, I started to try to logically justify why I had laughed.
‘It is perfectly clear that the contrast, the unbridgeable chasm between the worlds of yesterday and today—’
‘But why unbridgeable?’ (What white teeth!) ‘You can always build a bridge. Just picture it: drums, battalions, columns – they had all of those back then, too – and therefore—’
‘So, yes: clearly!’ I cried (what an incredible coincidence of thought: she was using almost the exact same words – repeating what I had written just before this walk). ‘Listen: we even have the same thoughts. Because today, nobody is just some “one”, everybody is “one of ”. And we’re all so alike . . .’
She: ‘Are you sure about that?’
I noticed her eyebrows were up at an acute angle to her temples, like the sharp little horns of an X, which, for some reason, threw me off balance again. I looked to my right and my left. And . . .
To the right of me, I-330 (I now saw her number) – slender, sharp, supple and stubborn, like a whip. To my left, O, so totally different, all made of curves, with her plump, childlike wrists. Then, at the outer edge of our foursome, the male number I didn’t know, with his body doubly bent, like the letter S. We were all so different . . .
To my right, I-330 seemed to have caught the lost look in my eyes and with a sigh, she continued my thought, ‘Yes . . . alas!’
Even though, essentially, her ‘alas’ was completely appropriate, once again, something in either her face or her voice . . .
With uncharacteristic gruffness, I countered, ‘Nothing to alas about. Science marches on and clearly, if not today, then in fifty or one hundred years . . .’
‘Even everyone’s noses will be—’
‘Yes, noses!’ I was practically shouting. ‘If there is still any reason for envy – even it’s just because I have a snub nose and someone else has—’
‘Well, your nose is probably what the Ancients would have called “classical”. But your hands . . . come on, show me your hands!’
I can’t stand it when people look at my hands. They’re all hairy and covered in fur. Stupid atavism. I stretched out my hands and, as impassively as I could, told her, ‘They’re monkey hands.’
She glanced at them then back at my face. ‘What an extremely curious chord they strike.’ She looked me up and down like she was weighing me on a scale, the horns on her eyebrows flared up again.
‘He’s registered to me today,’ O-90 cheerfully, rosily, opened her mouth.
Better she’d kept it shut – what did that have to do with anything? In general, this very sweet O is . . . how should I put it . . . the speed of her tongue is miscalibrated. The delay on the tongue should always be a few seconds over the speed of thought and never the other way around.
At the end of the avenue, the Accumulator Tower bell loudly rang seventeen. Personal Hour was over. I-330 headed away with that S-shaped male number. He commanded a certain respect, and, when I think of it, his face might have even been familiar. I must have seen him before somewhere, I won’t remember where right now.
Parting ways, I – still very X-ish – smiled back at me. ‘Stop by Auditorium 112 the day after tomorrow.’
I shrugged. ‘If I happen to be assigned to the auditorium you mentioned—’
‘You will be,’ she said with mysterious confidence.
This woman gave me the same unsettling feeling as an unresolvable irrational number inexplicably popping up in an equation. I was relieved to have at least a few moments alone with darling O.
We crossed four avenues arm in arm. Then, at the corner, it was time for her to go right, and me to the left.
‘I just wish I could come over tonight and put the blinds down. I mean, today, right now,’ O shyly lifted