OF HAMMERED GOLD

[notes:
	The title, of course, is from "Sailing to Byzantium" by W. B.
	Yeats (1927)
				I
	    That is no country for old men.  The young
	    In one another's arms, birds in the trees
	    --Those dying generations--at their song,
	    The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
	    Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
	    Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
	    Caught in that sensual music all neglect
	    Monuments of unageing intellect.

	    			II
	    An aged man is but a paltry thing,
	    A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
	    Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
	    For every tatter in its mortal dress,
	    Nor is their singing school but studying
	    Monuments of its  own magnificence;
	    And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
	    To the holy city of Byzantium.

	    			III
	    O sages standing in God's holy fire
	    As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
	    Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
	    And be the singing-masters of my soul.
	    Consume my heart away; sick with desire	 |
	    And fastened to a dying animal		 |
	    It knows not what it is; and gather me	 |
	    Into the artifice of eternity.		 |

	    			IV
	    Once out of nature I shall never take	 |
	    My bodily form from any natural thing,	 |
	    But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make	 |
	    Of hammered gold or gold enamelling		 |
	    To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
	    Or set upon a golden bough to sing
	    To lords and ladies of Byzantium
	    Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
]

Whisps of song and poetry, scraps of conversation, knife-sharp images
like shards of hallucination, surges of emotion like the tides of a
wine-dark sea.  The digitizer sweeping through his mind with the
shattered-mirror illogic of a dream.  It is not a dream.

	    Consume my heart away; sick with desire
	    And fastened to a dying animal
	    It knows not what it is; and gather me
	    Into the artifice of eternity.

Yeats?  The reference flows across his consciousness in letters red
as fresh blood, as roses.  "William Butler Yeats; 'Sailing To
Byzantium;' 1927, in..."  A foretaste.  He is already partly in both
worlds, then.  The emotion wells up, too, like blood from a wound
between clenched fingers; the stairwell with its glorious echo, the
book, loneliness hanging in the air like a veil; the knife...  No,
not then.  Not yet.

"Let it flow."  "Go with the flow."  "Everything flows."  "By the
waters of Babylon I--"  Consciousness picks a twisted path on the
steppingstones of association.	River over the stones.  A riverbank;
fishing with his father; casting lures among the stones toward the
waiting fish whose possible existence mattered much less than the
water, the wind, the trees, the myriad woodland voices, his father's
voice, stilled by time.	 At the end of the day a few bluegills
sizzling in the pan, perhaps three buttery mouthfulls to a helping.

"If wishes were fishes..."  The digitizer casting its tiny hooks into
a dying brain to catch the flickering silver thoughts, like bluegills
in the stream of consciousness.	 Tiny hooks on an invisible line, 
microscopic probes burrow into the grey matter, stimulating,
sampling, whispering microwaves to the waiting computer; whispering
all his secrets in the darkness.  Un-light ripples across the visual
cortex; a school of virtual minnows flash rainbow tails diagonally
from right to left.

Waterfall of voices, thunder of traffic sounds, remembered pain as
the mugger's knife glitters again in the alley, metallic taste of
adrenaline, gloating triumph as the mugger clutches his crotch and
screams.  The cold trip to the station for an endless night of forms
and questions and bitter coffee.


The interviews had been worse.  "You understand that the process is
irreversible.  If it runs to completion you will have suffered almost
total loss of brain function.  If you decide to stop before that
point, there is a ninety percent chance that you will be incurably
insane.  You will not survive the procedure as a functional human
being."

"So?  I'll be dead in a month anyway."

"If that were not the case we could not even consider the procedure. 
In addition, there is a twenty percent chance that the digitized
image will never stabilize.  In any case there are usually profound
personality changes."

"Beats dying."	Cancer eats away his flesh beneath a rippling
surface of morphine like a shark beneath the sea.  Or a horde of
crabs.  Cancer the crab.  Constellations rise and set; time passes.
"Horseman, pass by!"--more Yeats; another citation set in rubies.

The interviews pass through a mire of paperwork into their
psychiatric phase.  Endless, endless questions, alternately trivial
and impossible, the answers meaningful only to the electrodes, the
probes poised delicately at the outer layer of the cortex.  Pictures,
noises, smells, each carefully designed to evoke a calibrated
response.

"Remember, relax and let it flow.  Good luck!"  and the flickering 
twilight of stimulus and response, hallucinatory memories rising from
a drugged indifference like islands from a sea.  The little island in
the river, wind in the trees, sound of water, dark cloud of her hair. 
"Relax, let it happen..."  Yes, you always remember.  They plunge
together into that warm ocean, wrapped in stars and the sound of
rushing water.  In the too-bright morning, he brushes her long black
hair.  

Her cloud of black hair once more becomes the night; the Pleiades
burn in the darkness like a handfull of diamonds strewn in the window
at Tiffany's.  The Fifth Avenue crowd behind him surges like the sea
as he looks in the window, sweating in the moist heat of a New
York summer.  The crisp, cold air in the dome is like an echo of
space itself as the Pleiades call him back to the endless deeps of
the night sky.	Her hair is a river of night in the bright morning.


"Phase one image responding with 0.85 correlation.  Proceeding to
phase two data collection.  Prognosis excellent.  You're doing fine." 
Ruby subtitles for a voice like a silver bell.  

"Who are you?" 

"A construct.  I will be your guide during the transition. Call me
Karen."

"Karen.  Charon?  Ferryman for the dead:  that's appropriate.  What's
phase two?"

"Directed recall.  Try to think of things we've missed.  High
points in your life.  Later we'll use them as starting points."


Windswept hilltop, binoculars cold and heavy in his small hands. The
Pleiades, diamonds on velvet.  "What are the stars, Daddy?"

"The stars are like the Sun, only a lot farther away.  There are
probably worlds like the Earth around some of them."

"Are there people there?"

"Nobody knows."


He races to the telex with the comet's coordinates in his hand.  They
make love afterward, red dawn burning behind the curtains.  

His newborn daughter nestles in his arms, her eyes reflecting the
future.	 He murmers, "Hello, Bright Eyes.  Welcome to the world."
She will have her mother's improbable grey-green eyes.

Weddings: hers, his, "From this day forward..."  An old woman dies as
he sits at her bedside, silver river of hair that ripples over her
shoulder.  He brushes it one last time.  Her smile, the same across
the years.  Sound of another river in the night.

A cluster of abstract data points revolves slowly in four-dimensional
space, coaxing a few more secrets from the universe.  


"Phase three is feedback recall.  We use the imagery we have as a
starting point to evoke more.  Just relax; it goes more quickly that
way.  If you think of anything else we've missed, let me know; just
think my name."


Lectures.  "The Pleiades are the best-known example of an open
cluster.  Like most open clusters they are a region of active star
formation..."	Endless lectures.  A parade of professors flows past,
muttering.  Later, he and his colleagues mutter the same ancient
phrases to students no better than they themselves had been.

Students ebb and flow; every year a few odd creatures are cast up
on the beach with the tide.  The girl with the haunted eyes, a
night-thing, part of some strange story he never heard.  The gangling
boy with golden hair and the singing voice of a demented bullfrog. 
He sent mail from Farside Observatory only an hour before the meteor
strike.  (Letters the color of blood scroll up the screen.)

Night people.  Hackers, astronomers, janitors, lovers; long magical
conversations in the hours before dawn.	 Net people.  Week-long
exchanges with friends he'd never seen.  Constructs, AI's, images,
humans; words scrawled on the wall between their worlds.  "I love
you."  

"Can you love when you have never had a heart?"  

"Oh, yes!  Come, come to me.  Live with me always."

The road to the peak, in rain, in snow, in golden summer twilight. 
Back again in the light of a thousand mornings.  The computer screens
with their swirls of impossible colors.	 Love in the morning after
long nights alone.

His footsteps echo in a house grown suddenly quiet.  Three generations
of grey-green eyes meet his from the picture on the desk.  


"Karen, how long does this go on?  Do I have to live my whole life
over again?"

"Not as long as you fear.  Recall is running about 99 percent
subliminal now, and the ratio is still improving.  The longer we can
run it, the more accurate the image will be; but the fact that you're
getting bored is an indication that we're close."


	    Once out of nature I shall never take
	    My bodily form from any natural thing,
	    But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
	    Of hammered gold or gold enamelling...