Macro-contact

My first macro-contact was in November, on a Wednesday, at three-thirty in the afternoon, in Wei Lin’s study at the back of the old building of the Academy. I note this with such bureaucratic precision because at the Academy on that day the November snowfall began for the first time in sixteen years in the morning. November snowfalls with us are an evening affair, sometimes nocturnal; a morning one happens once in sixteen years and Olga will certainly note it in her folder (Olga keeps a meteorological calendar for her own purposes, and a twelve-hour shift is in her system of events categorically significant). The meteorology of the Academy and my personal biography synchronized that day. I now suspect that this coincidence is no coincidence; I won’t develop the point.

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Wei Lin came up to me in the kitchen. I was sitting with tea, by the window, watching the snow. Lia and Kira on that visit had stayed in Moscow (Lia had the Academy school today — new, private, two educators from Liber, no P-7/DV forms; Lia has been there four months and has not once told the educators about threads, because it became clear to her without explanation that in this school one doesn’t need to tell anything).

— Daniil.

— Yes.

— Today.

I looked at him. He was standing with the cane. Tapped it on the floor twice before entering the kitchen, as usual. The cane is dark ash, blackened with age; I suspect the cane’s age is around one hundred and eighty years, and Wei Lin didn’t buy it himself; most likely it came out to him in a basement during some renovation, and he kept it.

— Today — what?

— Today we’re guiding you.

I set the cup down. The tea was hot, but I stopped drinking it at that second. Wei Lin has a way of saying today we’re guiding you in two words such that it instantly becomes important for you to figure out who’s guiding, where, and why. He doesn’t do it for effect; he simply has a life economy, and extra words are expensive.

— Where?

— Macro-contact. First for you. Noma has done the preparation. I’ll go third. The being — the fourth, uncounted.

The being, uncounted. That meant a fifth-floor object that in the Academy exists in an artifact: a black stone egg the size of a fist, stands on the shelf in Wei Lin’s apartment, watches. It has no official name and never has had one (she, because Wei Lin once designated her as She, and ever since that has been the established grammatical fact in the Academy). Unofficially she’s called Quinta, feminine, from the Latin quinta, fifth. The name took root at the Academy gradually: in the thirties they tried Echo, in the fifties — Black Margarita, in the seventies — simply the Egg. Quinta won in eighty-four, and since then no alternatives surface.

(By that point I already had one theoretical language in which Quinta could be thought about. Hyperobjects, by Timothy Morton, an American philosopher who in 2013 had the nerve to write a book about objects too large for direct perception. Climate, radiation, the neutrino background — in his terms these are all hyperobjects: they exist, but an observer can’t assemble them into a single figure, because the observer’s figure is smaller than the object. You can only describe traces: ticks on a seismograph, numbers in a WHO report, a headache. Quinta in this logic is a chamber-sized hyperobject. She’s the size of a fist, but her figure is bigger than mine, and my first floor can’t assemble her into a figure. I can only describe traces: pressure in the chest, the shoulder blade, dryness in the throat. That’s what macro-contact is: a procedure in which I am the camera and Quinta is too large a subject, and the picture comes out blurred by design.)

I had one brief acquaintance with Quinta seven years ago. Wei Lin at his apartment took the egg down from the shelf, set it on the table, said “look,” I looked. She looked back at me, and the table stopped being a table for about five minutes. After that Wei Lin covered her with his palm, like a lamp with a cap, and everything returned to its place. Since then she hadn’t looked at me again; today — she would look again. I prepared for this a bit inwardly, though I knew in advance: for Quinta you can’t prepare.

She opens perceptually: if you look at the egg for a certain amount of time with a certain bearing, you start to feel that someone is looking back, and from this you begin to feel pain in some specific point of the body (different for different people; with Noma — under the right shoulder blade; with Wei Lin — the center of the forehead; with me, as I’d learn today — the left hand).

— Am I in order?

Wei Lin looked at me. Was silent for six seconds.

— You’re ready. Over eight years you’ve developed a stable invariant after rewrite. This is the final exam I’m taking from you before handing you over to Noma. After today you are — already her student, if you wish. Or mine — if it goes that way.

— So this is the last?

— The last mandatory one. Beyond that by choice. How’s your choice?

— I have one.

— Then — after lunch. Two hours to prepare.

He turned and left.