Then came the new Mercury Anomaly. The path of a planet in space-time, we found to our dismay, could be an appendage of a creature whose body extended across galaxies, with holes many parsecs in diameter and gaps millennia in duration. The transcategoricals, as is now common knowledge, could combine a phrase of music, a particular human jawbone, a black hole, all the entities of a certain mass or shape in the universe, and so on, in a single intelligent being, with whom communication began to be possible.
....
Tenacity rolled onto his side. “Tell these lubbers all about it, ‘Scope. We got nothing to do till the transcat’s gone.”
“I was gonna. They made me early on, but that’s not how come I’m old. I was born old. They had to do me that way. It was just after the Mercury Anomaly, the second one, the big one, when the transcategoricals shimmered in, and Descartes and Newton and Einstein and Hume and everybody in the whole history of Western Civilization who ever mentioned a point or a line or a frame of reference or a sequence of one thing after another—they were all quite suddenly vestigial… I bet you wish you knew half of what I do.”
‘Scope covered his “mouth” as if he had hiccoughed, and then went on. “Everybody Earthside had always thought the world was built up out of particles of one kind or another—sensations or quarks or souls. Well, now they saw that that idea was upside-down: the world is built down from one big, undifferentiated whole, down into particles. And the particles are provisional. The borders between things are unreal, like pocks on a putty ball: squoosh! and they’re all rearranged. Nobody had ever thought that big since the Upanishads or the Mahayana Sutras. That’s where Buddhism started to come into favor.
“But who were these transcats? You know what I mean? That’s what people were saying. How can we get rid of them? That’s what everybody wanted, right off, as if that was ever an option. It would be like trying to gnaw off your brains and heart. We’re laced through with transcats like brine with salt. I was supposed to be a kind of search-and-destroy machine, but all I want to do is dress up Betsy McCall.”
“It’s gone now, isn’t it?” No Mind said.
“No.” Old ‘Scope pursed his wrinkles to wet them. “Sit tight—that’s the best thing. This one’s just passing through. It won’t be long.
“It’s ironic when you think about it. The tech they used to make me, the skinbags got it all from transcats—from watching them, and from being watched by them, the funny way that works. As if water could taste you because you swallow it. They had to rewrite all the science books and stop thinking of skins as skins. Mind you, they’d always known they were permeable to air and moisture and thoughts and feelings, but people wanted to hold onto the idea that everybody was something apart. The transcats made that hard.
“The Planners made me to scan the universe for transcats, to log every border between one thing and another, every way you could define it, cross-referencing each phenomenon for fifteen-billion light years in every direction. I was supposed to be a sieve. They were going to use me to pan the universe for transcats. They figured that then they could get rid of them somehow, or at least get out of their way… It’s leaving now… but, you know, you can’t.
“The Planners focused down their big n-dimensional hypostat guns on fragments of twenty or thirty cosmology mavens and astrographers, along with a tightrope walker I believe, for his particular concentration. They also hypostatted a number of ephemerides, yes, a bunch of technical beeohtees, and a part of Tycho Brahe, which they picked up in the dyne pool where the transcats like to feed.
“But they didn’t have their tech down, did they, all that non-dual transcat-think being so new to them? Any hypostat beam cuts back and forth through time and zigzags through space like a spastic’s backstitch. Some little girl in what’s left of Kenya, a seven year old snoozing, spooned against her mama’s belly in their cool thatch hut, was smack in the path of the hypostatic ray. And pow zingo! When you hear that nya-nya-nya nya-nya in my voice, why, it’s her.”
— Eliot Fintushel, Zen City.
....
Tenacity rolled onto his side. “Tell these lubbers all about it, ‘Scope. We got nothing to do till the transcat’s gone.”
“I was gonna. They made me early on, but that’s not how come I’m old. I was born old. They had to do me that way. It was just after the Mercury Anomaly, the second one, the big one, when the transcategoricals shimmered in, and Descartes and Newton and Einstein and Hume and everybody in the whole history of Western Civilization who ever mentioned a point or a line or a frame of reference or a sequence of one thing after another—they were all quite suddenly vestigial… I bet you wish you knew half of what I do.”
‘Scope covered his “mouth” as if he had hiccoughed, and then went on. “Everybody Earthside had always thought the world was built up out of particles of one kind or another—sensations or quarks or souls. Well, now they saw that that idea was upside-down: the world is built down from one big, undifferentiated whole, down into particles. And the particles are provisional. The borders between things are unreal, like pocks on a putty ball: squoosh! and they’re all rearranged. Nobody had ever thought that big since the Upanishads or the Mahayana Sutras. That’s where Buddhism started to come into favor.
“But who were these transcats? You know what I mean? That’s what people were saying. How can we get rid of them? That’s what everybody wanted, right off, as if that was ever an option. It would be like trying to gnaw off your brains and heart. We’re laced through with transcats like brine with salt. I was supposed to be a kind of search-and-destroy machine, but all I want to do is dress up Betsy McCall.”
“It’s gone now, isn’t it?” No Mind said.
“No.” Old ‘Scope pursed his wrinkles to wet them. “Sit tight—that’s the best thing. This one’s just passing through. It won’t be long.
“It’s ironic when you think about it. The tech they used to make me, the skinbags got it all from transcats—from watching them, and from being watched by them, the funny way that works. As if water could taste you because you swallow it. They had to rewrite all the science books and stop thinking of skins as skins. Mind you, they’d always known they were permeable to air and moisture and thoughts and feelings, but people wanted to hold onto the idea that everybody was something apart. The transcats made that hard.
“The Planners made me to scan the universe for transcats, to log every border between one thing and another, every way you could define it, cross-referencing each phenomenon for fifteen-billion light years in every direction. I was supposed to be a sieve. They were going to use me to pan the universe for transcats. They figured that then they could get rid of them somehow, or at least get out of their way… It’s leaving now… but, you know, you can’t.
“The Planners focused down their big n-dimensional hypostat guns on fragments of twenty or thirty cosmology mavens and astrographers, along with a tightrope walker I believe, for his particular concentration. They also hypostatted a number of ephemerides, yes, a bunch of technical beeohtees, and a part of Tycho Brahe, which they picked up in the dyne pool where the transcats like to feed.
“But they didn’t have their tech down, did they, all that non-dual transcat-think being so new to them? Any hypostat beam cuts back and forth through time and zigzags through space like a spastic’s backstitch. Some little girl in what’s left of Kenya, a seven year old snoozing, spooned against her mama’s belly in their cool thatch hut, was smack in the path of the hypostatic ray. And pow zingo! When you hear that nya-nya-nya nya-nya in my voice, why, it’s her.”
— Eliot Fintushel, Zen City.
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