Jeu des coquilles de nautilus (Le) (French Edition)

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She has no desire to find out more about this contingent variant of herself, however exotic. She turns toward "Palli Kedia," resolved to do what every Voyager does upon arrival: Palli Kedia seems reluctant to talk, once they have exchanged names. Talitha shows her wish to communicate, pointing to the objects around them and saying all the names given them on other Submerged Earths. Palli Kedia may be reluctant to talk, but she is quite ready to communicate. The language is based on a complex sign system assisted occasionally by a few words, sometimes by a mere sound.

There are Voyagers who never tire of the infinite forms of humanity encountered. They are the ones who feed the Archives in the Centres, to which they travel only to leave again.

Talitha isn't one of these explorers. What struck her very soon in her Voyages were the recurrent patterns, the resemblances, the repetitions.

She seeks something else, something totally other, unimaginable, amazing. She leaves the village next morning. If this Earth resembles the other three fairly closely, the political and scientific centres will be in the southeast. Once again she'll probably have to travel to the extreme south of the continent, where the capital stands on a cliff in one case entirely artificial , a city built as a challenge to the sea and its inevitable encroachment.

On the first Submerged Earth this was a true calamity — a natural disaster. On the others, humans had played a considerable part in the general warming of their planet. Changes came with great speed, made worse by the accompanying recurrence of violent seismic activity. On an overpopulated Earth, and in societies that were all the more fragile because of their complex technologies, these upheavals were catastrophic. The long-term consequences had decimated the population on the third Earth, and the human race was slowly becoming extinct.

She had taken nearly three years to find a group of scientists either dynamic or stoic enough to continue doing research, and to convince them to develop the machine that one of them was tinkering with for the sake of amusement — a machine that, unknown to him, was an embryo Bridge. Never had she stayed so long in one place, even in the universe where she had at last made her peace with Egon. It was also the first time she'd actually had to help build a Bridge. She left that planet, that universe, with a brief question in her mind: But it was probably already too late to change the fate of that dying human race.

In any case, she was no missionary and she knew perfectly well she hadn't given that Earth a Bridge in order to fulfil the secret plan of some hidden divinity: Now, as she travels over almost vanished roads, through ruined towns and landscapes still bearing the scars of ancient devastation, she soon feels a growing anxiety.

Does she detect an increasingly recurrent pattern here? She'd found it more and more problematic to leave the preceding Submerged Earths. This one seems to have regressed even further in the same direction as the last. Not much is known about how the Voyage works, apart from the physical functioning of the Bridge itself up to the moment when the anaesthetized body is cooled to almost absolute zero and disappears from the capsule. But the law, the only sure law, is that the Bridge always provides access to universes that you can leave , one where a Bridge exists even if not called that , or where it is technologically possible for the Voyager to have one built.

There is nothing surprising in this, because it is not the Bridge that propels Voyagers into the various universes but the Voyagers themselves, their psyche, or as believers say, their Matrix. Voyagers may have sent themselves into universes without any means of escape, because they desired it either consciously or unconsciously.

It is a statistical certainty, but materially unverifiable, since such Voyagers have never returned to the Centres to confide their experiences to the Archives. She knows she doesn't yearn for that kind of universe; that means there must be a Bridge on this planet or the possibility of one — or its equivalent.

After two weeks of solitary walking, her fears are allayed. She comes to a small city where the remaining inhabitants speak a language closely resembling the Euskade she'd learned on the second Submerged Earth. Without too much difficulty, they agree to provide her with a small automotive vehicle in fairly good shape.

Title: Le pont du froid

The roads improve toward the southeast, they tell her, and she'll have no trouble getting to the big city she's looking for. The city is like its predecessors, a constant from one of these universes to another, revealing the stubborn resolve of the city's creators to fashion a place at once functional, comfortable, and aesthetically pleasing. A rather too carefully orchestrated casualness seems to have governed its development.

The parks and gardens have run wild and are invading the streets and squares, a green tide attacking monuments and buildings. She walks the length of the Promenade, the name here for the long, tree-lined esplanade that follows the curve of the clifftop — or what had once been a clifftop. At high tide the water washes over the flagstones, swirling around the benches and trees in small, patient eddies there is no violence in the sea, it knows it has won.

The weather is mild and the sunlight has a pearly quality from the permanent haze masking the sky. She contemplates the Promenade's sweep, subtly distorted by the thin layer of water, and already she knows, senses, what the still-functional data banks will tell her: She doesn't give up at once; she will not, cannot believe this. She consults the data banks, criss-crosses the city interrogating the inhabitants — a nucleus of several thousand diehards clustered in the quarter between the Arts Palace, the Government Complex, and the fortress-hill of the Institute.

Whatever its names elsewhere — names meaning "academy" or "university"— the Institute is the real seat of power.

Here she finds interested listeners, minds still curious, and a wistful willingness: But to build such a machine. The problem isn't so much to build it as to reconstitute the technology necessary for making the required materials. She won't, can't believe it. People sigh and pull long faces, but they give her names and maps, and at last supply her with a precious, small airborne vehicle.

They wish her good luck, but they are right to be skeptical. After six months, she has to accept the evidence: If one exists on this Earth, it has been forgotten and all trace of it lost. In a flash, she sees herself as an old Voyager, transformed into an obdurate explorer, a detective, interminably ruffling through tattered documents, following dubious trails in the heart of jungles and ruins, tirelessly interrogating human survivors who have reverted to a primitive state. Another Talitha in another universe, maybe, but not her.

She won't chase a phantom for the rest of her life, the mirage of a nonexistent Bridge; she won't pay such a crazy price to avoid despair. She journeys part of the way on the back of a dromedary , an animal no more and no less strange than others in other universe — hump-backed, a long-legged quadruped, its long, arched neck resembling a ship's prow, rolling like a dinghy as it walks.

The name has stuck, despite the fact that the desert is finally disappearing beneath the Sahara Sea, which linked up long ago with the other sea — a sea with no special name anymore, because it is the same everywhere, the same inexorable invader, "the sea. The Institute scholars are certainly not pleased, but they pity her. They offer her their hospitality, but she feels restless, preferring to explore the city, camping wherever she can, striding tirelessly through the familiar yet strange places in a city where she had spent three years of her life, not so very long ago, in another universe.

She catalogues resemblances and differences, but as usual she notices the resemblances most. Does she actually see them? She records, she moves, tries to tire herself out on rambles so that she will fall into a dreamless sleep at night. She ignores the city's dangers, the wild animals, the solitary and sometimes aggressive humans; these don't compare with the real terror, the instant of inattention when the noise of all this motion fades, and the inner voice is heard again.

I cannot leave, there is no Bridge, I am stuck here! Condemned to live and die here, on this drowning Earth. Is all she knows or thinks she knows about the Bridge and the Voyage false? The Bridge takes you where, consciously or unconsciously, you wish to go, until you have mastered the Voyage, until you know yourself.

Then you can go where you please, or return. What she knows or thinks she knows of herself — is that also false? After twenty years of Voyaging, is she unable to understand why she has propelled herself onto this dead-end planet? She is stupefied, furious — and scared to death.

So she goes off to yet another quarter of the city, she probes the occasional data banks that still function, learning in bits and pieces the story of this world, this society, this city, not really caring what her Total Recall is recording. The crucial thing is to fill the threatening silence with voices and images, to prevent the horrifying litany from welling up: When at last she gives up, she returns to the Institute and settles into one of the residential wings of the fortress-campus. Naturally, some of the Institute members ask her to record her experiences in other universes for the central Infolibrary.

There are no machines for abridging the process, but it doesn't matter — telling it helps pass the time. She accesses her Total Recall and listens to it speak. The park is named after tiny, colourful birds, living jewels that gather nectar from the flowers beneath a huge, transparent cupola in the middle of the main lawn. But it isn't the birds that fascinate her: There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, everywhere — the bodies of men and women, sometimes in graceful poses, sometimes in stances so natural as to seem strange.

It was dusk when she first entered the park, and she thought that the whole city had congregated there. Figures stood, sat, lay on the ground, rested against trees, even in trees.

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And then she realized that all these people were completely naked and motionless. As she came closer, she saw that they were made of stone, or something mineral-like. All of them statues, all of them highly individualized. They had worn clothing once, but it had gradually rotted away. The Infolibrary provided her with curious pictures of this gradual divestment, showing multitudes of statues with garments in varying stages of disintegration.

But the statues themselves were made of a material impervious to salt air, and yet so delicate in texture, porous, like a honeycomb. As she touched it, she had a momentary vision of the park finally submerged beneath the sea, and the statues gradually floating off their benches, or trees, or lawns, drifting with the tides. In reality, however, the stone was very solid, very heavy. The statues would remain anchored to the sea-bottom in the park, and moonfish would replace the tiny birds. The old biologist's tone sparks her interest. It is an intricate mixture of amused disdain and an undercurrent of resentment of disgust, of fear?

He says no more, and the Infolibrary is also curiously laconic on the subject. Six hundred years earlier, during the brief period when all was still in a state of equilibrium, when the Earth's civilization had not yet begun to topple toward extinction, scientists and technicians had perfected an artificial organic material with complex properties, capable of imitating life.

The artifacts created by biosculptors out of this material had a certain amount of independence that diminished with age — and they aged rapidly. Generally, after about a dozen years, their gradually slowing metabolism produced complete mineralization. For some unfathomable reason, it became fashionable at one point for biosculptors to give their creations a motor tropism that directed them to Colibri Park as life was ending.

And there they stopped forever. The history of biosculpture covers barely a hundred and fifty years. The sources of this science — this art — are obscure. Its origins seem to have been in more or less secret government research immediately after the so-called "Catastrophe" period, the fifty or so years after the first Great Tides. The Infolibrary is very discreet on this point. Nevertheless, various signs clearly indicate to her trained mind that the data bank has been fixed and that the Institute itself has probably lent a hand in this.

Old stories of a bygone day that seem to have left fairly conscious traces in the minds of the last survivors. Her old vitality has rekindled itself and she feels the need to act instead of letting the days slip by. This small mystery comes at just the right moment to distract her. It doesn't take long to solve: Some biosculptors clearly improved on their basic material, to the point where their creations couldn't be distinguished from real human beings. And some biosculptors actually decided that their creatures, their artifacts, were indeed human beings. They had actually created beings that lived longer than normal humans, and above all, could procreate — something normal humans were doing less often and less well.

The Institute had outlawed biosculpture, but it had neither the political power nor, in reality, the necessary conviction to enforce this. Now, only a few small communities of the original human race remain, and these have become rigid in their isolation. Over the centuries, however, often without knowing it, humans had mated with artifacts. Their halfbreed descendants, the hendemados, and the descendants of mating between artifacts themselves, are slowly, very slowly, repopulating the world.

It's recovering slowly, very slowly, from a near-fatal illness. When she's finished putting together the pieces of the puzzle, she is astonished. How could she have thought this planet was dying? She has let herself be hypnotized by ruined cities and the traces of a once-powerful civilization that can still be seen everywhere.

Above all, she hasn't really cared whether it was dying or not, since this planet was supposed to be merely a stage in her Voyages. And when she realized she wasn't going to leave again. Now she understands both the cause of her illusion and that this cause no longer exists. She suddenly thinks of the fishing village, of Tilitha who may be her double in this universe. Why not, why not? Going back to her starting point would be a gesture replete with satisfying irony: To go back to her starting point: She sees things clearly, now so easy in retrospect.

All those Earths, identical to hers, were telling her the same thing as those other, falsely different planets: And here, the hendemados. And just because she, Talitha, will live out her life on this particular Earth does not mean life itself is becoming extinct. Through the huge picture window of the reading room she has a view over the city to the sea, a dull gleam beneath the veiled sun. She can certainly make this sacrifice to her new but useless clairvoyance: Make one last little voyage, and for once the first and last time know where she is going.

Year One, after all. I'm certainly assuming a lot. Welcomed without fanfare by the village. They recognized me and greeted me by name, helped me settle into a small, quickly built hut on the edge of the village. They didn't say much — and always in sign language.

Le Jeu des coquilles de nautilus

I'll soon learn it. Easier to use the first person: Because they are observing me — an external perspective that in effect makes me draw into myself, concentrate on myself, unlike my own perspective, which undoes me. It seems they've decided to make an exception for me and talk a little, at least for long enough to teach me the sign language. Spoken language is too precious to be wasted in verbalizing the trivia of daily life.

It's easy to establish correlations from the crumbs they let fall — after all, I was trained to do it. Palli Kedia came in person to see how I was getting along. A supposedly fortuitous meeting. I was coming back from my morning walk on the shore.

How quickly one settles into a routine! She greeted me, we talked for a moment, and I continued on my way, conscious of having passed a test. Now it's Tilitha who's keeping an eye on me. Or so I suppose. Our meetings, always on the shore morning or evening, also seem purely accidental. Tilitha is always naked, often wet. Dolphins play in the waves while we talk.

They come with her, go with her; she calls them "cousins. Their habitat is under water, in the forest of giant kelp covering the drowned cities. Tilitha is the sister of Palli Kedia. The two races can crossbreed. Among the arevags, one child in four — almost always a boy — turns out to be a hendemado and is given by the mother to the village. The same proportion of arevags is born in the village; they are always girls, and they return to the sea, as in Tilitha's case.

Both are almost completely amphibious, with the hendemados able to remain under water for long periods, and the arevags able to stay in the open air for over a day without discomfort. Their respective capacities depend on the degree of crossbreeding — scientific details to be recorded in my Total Recall, not in this diary. What I see of this double race, what I experience, is the constant mixing, the opening of one to the other, and the impression that the water's edge isn't a frontier for these people but a door to be opened at will. Here, water and earth are clearly distinct, and the two races despite their ability to crossbreed are different, if only because the arevags are exclusively female; yet they are open to one another, for better or for worse.

There are quarrels, jealousies, and longings that cause a certain amount of strife, and life, particularly in mixed families, seems fairly agitated. Sign language may not be noisy, but it can be pretty vehement for all that. The other day I witnessed a public outburst that ended in blows and tears. By the by, as far as language goes, each race seems to have adopted the habits of the other. The arevags tend to speak aloud when they come to the village, and the villagers communicate with them by signs, as though they were under water. Both, however, have begun to observe a cautious silence toward me, the stranger.

Probably they don't quite know what category of human to put me in: My talks with Tilitha have been fairly brief these last few days. I'm not even sure our meetings are part of a predetermined plan on the part of the two communities. Perhaps it's a purely personal initiative on her part, because of the similarity of our names.

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This seems to fascinate her. To start with, she didn't ask me where I came from; instead, she explained who she was and where she came from thereby confirming my theories about the arevags. I tried to do the same, but without much confidence. How was I to make her understand the concept of the Bridge? I drew the universe-tree in the wet sand, showing the ramifications of its branching universes. She listened, nodding, her eyes shining. I wondered what she made of it. Then she asked, "How?

Jeu des coquilles de nautilus #70

She came alive, though, when I began to explain how the Voyage worked. The descent to absolute zero, the cold sleep, all motion stopped, and at the heart of this absolute immobility, absolute motion: I described the universes where I had met Egons — and Talithas. She meditated this for a while but said nothing. Then, with a sharp fingertip, she drew a closed circle around the tree in the sand. The arevags don't go defenceless into the depths: In a few minutes she has grasped what has taken me five years to comprehend: That's how I translate it.

What she said in her language was, "Ao Tilitha. It's used to introduce oneself to strangers, or talk of oneself or others in important discussions — when it is felt the speaker is not the individual woman or man, but the person, a concept transcending gender. I asked her about the origin of this so-called human pronoun. It was a long story, Tilitha said with a smile, getting up. Hadn't we time, I asked? She shook her head.

Of course, it's a lot more complicated than I thought. Ao , the human pronoun, implies active virtuality. There is another, O , related to passive virtuality. Tilitha explained this to me or thought she was explaining it, while plunging me into even greater darkness by recounting a legend. From early religious beliefs through cyberspatial dreams of escaping the body, Western culture has often demonstrated disdain for fleshly existence. Specifically, readers practice a hypertextual construction of meaning, building on a convergence of digital computer and analog human pattern-recognition memory.

As modeled by Case, this cognitive shift requires a radical rebooting.

Secondary Verifications

The experience of reading the novel, however, also offers an alternative model of transformation, one of extended adaptation that would more gradually reshape cognitive habits toward the kinship Gibson envisions. Ultimately, Neuromancer modulates between these more radical and more gradual models of adaptation. Three intimately linked narrative components—each closely related to certain protocols of reading fiction and of particular interest to science fiction—form the theoretical and analytical bases of this study: The essay examines the possibilities opened up by the becoming-animal of the nonhuman, and explores how this reworks the Frankenstein barrier in twenty-first century technoscientific biocapitalism.

This essay will argue that such claims underestimate the diversity of the genre, overlooking the ways in which certain foundational tropes and narrative structures evident most clearly in pulp-era sf invite plots and figures aligned more closely with fascism than with progressive thought. For some critics, the anti-progressive politics of many pulp-era works is an unfortunate historical quirk, long since transcended and forgotten; this essay argues, on the other hand, that a kind of latent pulp-era fascism survives even in much ostensibly progressive contemporary sf. Tracing the afterlife of fascist tropes and themes complicates a host of critical claims about the ideological leanings of the genre.

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